


Brass and Shadows

by lightscreener



Series: Brass and Shadows [1]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Pre-War, Slavery, Sticky Sexual Interfacing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-18
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-05-21 00:30:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 18
Words: 47,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6031555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightscreener/pseuds/lightscreener
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A factory-drone dreams of something more, only to find himself caught up in the machinations of demigods and would-be Emperors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Mast

**Author's Note:**

> A story based on a Kaon/Tarn RP I ran with a friend. The setting/backstory is sort of our own, based very loosely around a tabletop RPG called Exalted, which we used to run it. It's still set on Cybertron, and many of the setting elements should be framiliar. I've tried to stay true to the characters and their personalities (at least I hope so), even if some of the background elements might seem strange or non-canonical.
> 
> While there aren't any specific warnings for this Chapter, this is a story about the DJD - even if it starts pretty early in Kaon/Overload's life, so expect warnings to be added for later Chapters.
> 
> Homestuck-style chats are used to represent the comm, because I am trash.

Overload had a private room.

He wasn't special. In fact, he hardly stood out among the thousands upon thousands of drones who were owned by the Dependable Power Company. He wasn't a work crew leader or particularly hard working or fucking the right people. 

No, it wasn't any of that. It was that firefighting crews and suppressant systems were expensive, and when (the now infamous) Building Nine had burned down, his roommate had been one of the unfortunate mechs who had been trapped inside and incinerated alive. 

There had been an investigation, and as Overload understood it, Dependable Power had been fined. A week later it was back to business as usual. 

Justice, after all, was for mechs who owned themselves. 

Management, through some oversight, had never assigned him a new roommate. It was a situation he was fine with and that he didn't draw attention to, because it made his life just a little more tolerable. 

The drones whose contracts were owned by Dependable Power never retired. After the deductions for their shared one-room apartment and energon and the costs DP recouped for their pre-fabbed bodies, there was nothing left over. They worked until they went offline and _when_ they inevitably offlined on the job they were replaced. Life was cheap and sparks were expendable in the Age of Two Suns. 

The standard work week at Dependable clocked in at one hundred hours. Five eighteen hour shifts, followed by a half-shift and a day off at the end of the week. He was halfway though his week - the forty-fouth one of the year, laying on his back in a tiny apartment and trying to work up the enthusiasm to roll off his berth. 

_There are worse fates_ , he reminded himself. Missing more then one shift per three solar sweeps might get him relegated to drudge work, or sold again, or locked in his alt-mode on the continuous crew. 

_So get up._

His whole body ached as he got to his feet and stretched his arms above his head. He felt heavy. It was a lingering, constant soreness deep in his protoflesh that he suspected only a long rest would cure, and there was none of that to look forward to. Each night he collapsed into his berth exhausted and woke to the start-of-shift pings in nearly the same condition. Seeing a doctor might have helped, but the doctors at the power plant only saw the drones for a quick once over when they came online or when they were extracting a dead transformer from the Array. They didn't hear petty concerns, and something told Overload that, 'I'm sore and tired all the time' was a petty concern.

His fuel levels read at a bare thirty-two percent as he left the clumsily stacked hab buildings and headed into the main plant. High enough to satisfy the minimums the Senate required and low enough to discourage an escape attempt or rebellion. An early-warning light blinked at him in the corner of his HUD, and he ignored it. There was no energon scheduled for today, none until after his shift tomorrow. He could manage, if he was careful, and get to tomorrow without redlining. 

He was halfway to the Array when his comm pinged him.

\-- luckyNumber [LN] sent lightningBug [LB] a message! --

luckyNumber was Payroll, one of the punch clocks. He was a drone too - another of Malleus Prime's bastards, though as an assistant to the company's accountants, he lived a bare fraction better than the rank and file.

LN: Overload--  
LB: blow me  
LN: Sure thing. Open your panels.  
LN: If you're not in the Array, don't go in.

Overload disliked most people, but he occasionally thought of Payroll as a friend. 

LB: why  
LB: :0  
LB: is it on fire lol  
LN: If you're outside, you can surely _see_ it's not. They sold contracts, and we're in the main hall drawin' lots.  
LN: Get over here or they might volunteer you.  
LB: maybe they will  
LB: thatd be nice  
LB: wouldnt have slaghead clocks comming me every second trying to get inside my panels  
LN: Live your dream, buddy.

Drawing lots meant they were going to stand around with their pistons in their servos instead of going to work. It was a balancing act with the Company. If your contract was sold, they would hold your last pay as a 'transfer fee' - and just because the drones at Dependable power were technically working for nothing didn't mean that they wanted to work for _nothing_. When they sold contracts, letting the drones have the day off while they figured out who would stay and who would go was the best way to prevent the workers on their way out from vandalizing anything in acts of petty revenge. Of course, no work also meant they weren't getting fed tomorrow, so he was going to have to stretch his energon over the next two days instead of one. The thought of it made his tanks clench down in hunger as he turned towards the main hall, letting the prickle of an identity scan wash over him when he passed through the doors.

The main meeting hall outside the Array was full, packed with buzzing engines and closely pressed fields. He picked out Payroll's bulky form immediately, matte grey and cheaply made - fully three feet taller than he was, and elbowed his way through the crowd towards him. 

From the looks of it, everyone was here. The entire First, Second, and Third shifts. Around half of the Fourth shift was crowding in, mostly at the back. Fourth was Overload's shift, and they should rightly have been in the Array getting attached, but not if they were getting sold. Even the minibots who slaved away in the ducts and the waste vents were here, either trying to get to the front of the room or sitting on the shoulders of bigger mechs. He half-expected to see someone from the continuous crew.

_Fuck me Primus_ , he thought. _How many contracts did they sell?_

Redcap, one of the third shift crew leaders, was with Payroll when he finally made it to the punchclock. Her arms were folded across her chestplates and her lips were pressed into a twitching, annoyed line. Most things annoyed Redcap, and Overload sometimes thought of her as a kindred spirit. Most things annoyed him too.

She was the same model as he was - even part of a concurrent batch, but when they'd put her though the paint machine, the whole thing had malfunctioned. Instead of the distinctive red-yellow colour scheme most of the transformers at Dependable sported, she was entirely red. Even her faceplate, outer optics, and chrome parts hadn't escaped the torrent of cherry-red paint. She was apparently a ' _defect within acceptable parameters_ ', so she hadn't been scrapped instantly when they'd pulled her off the line.

He thought it suited her.

"They sold eight-fucking-thousand contracts," Redcap said as he walked up, like she already knew what he was going to ask and like she couldn't tell when she was swearing. 

"What?" He could barely keep the incredulous tone out of his voice. It was a nonsense number. It was more than two and a half shifts. They'd have to shut down the Array. They'd have to-- "How?"

"Eight thousand," Payroll repeated helpfully. His voice was a deep baritone with a constant rhythm to it, like a clock ticking. "Don't know how. Gonna be quite the toss up around here."

"Huh." Overload glanced to the front of the room where one of mechs from Management was taking volunteers and adding other mechs to the lottery. "Are either of you volunteering?"

Depending on how you wanted to look at it, were plenty of reasons to volunteer yourself to be sold. If your current owners had it out for you, you could do a lot worse than trying to make a fresh start. Sometimes companies who were buying would offer bonuses in an attempt to entice a better class of workers than they'd get from a lottery. Maybe it didn't matter, because Payroll shook his head.

"Not going to be any fucking better in Iacon than it is here." Redcap shrugged without uncrossing her arms. "Owners are owners."

"Iacon? I don't get it," Overload frowned. "Can't they... get all the sparks they want in Iacon? The Well's there. The Two Suns are there."

"Takes time," Payroll said, "to dig up the Vaults. Even if the Prime can find as many as he wants. To make the bodies. Induce the Ignitions. Then you gotta train them. Probably some young mech with more shanix than brains thinks he's come up with some way to make electricity that no one else has, and now he just needs frames."

Overload rolled his optics. "Which is where we come in. I didn't even know there were Arrays in Iacon."

"Doubt they're in of the nice part of town," Redcap snorted. "Not like we're goddamn house drones, so get to the front and get into the lottery."

"Yeah," Overload glanced at the front of the room. "Guess you're right."

The mech sitting at the front of the room on a makeshift stage was part of Management, but Overload had never seen her before. That wasn't unusual, the real higher-ups rarely came down to the production floor. She had tires and windshields and door wings, so he guessed she was a car. Fancy paint and fake talons on the ends of her first three fingers, so he guessed she was high-caste too. Security drones stood to either side of her, their paint blue-black, their frames heavy, and their faces tight and ugly, like clenched fists. There were dozens of mechs milling around the foot of the stage, and he waited impatiently, annoyed with the buzz of their overlapping fields.

"Designation?" She asked, when he finally got to the front. 

"R-Series. 6625." Overload keyed the panel on his arm open and held it up to her. Drones didn't have legal names, but most of them picked out nicknames for themselves. He hadn't known the... other meaning of his own when he'd selected it, and even worse, it seemed to have stuck.

"Will you be coming to Iacon with us?" She asked, her voice cheery as she reached over to scan him.

"No," he said. "The lottery."

"Well then," she smiled, and for the first time he noticed that all of her dental chips were pointed. "Good luck."


	2. The Sword

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kaon/Overload/6625's alt mode is a transformer, a device that changes electricity into a useful form. 
> 
> So he's a transformer who turns into a literal transformer. He's got a few alt-modes to go through before he becomes a torture chair.

Payroll went to Iacon, but Overload and Redcap got to say.

There was no chance to say goodbye, and he couldn't feel bad about it. He didn't know what he would have said, but as his energy levels crawled down to fifteen percent after two days without fuel, he had a lot of time to think about it. The pain in his tanks meant he couldn't recharge properly.

The next day, Management voted unanimously to up the normal work week to one-hundred and twenty hours, and by the time he was standing in line at dispensing staion the day after that, the dull pains in his frame has become sharp. In the corner of his HUD a warning was pinging him constantly, immovable in the face of any attempt to dismiss it. His processor felt sluggish and his pedes felt like someone had partially magnetized them to the floor. 

_Keep it the fuck together_ , he thought. Collapsing from hunger probably meant getting scrapped, but maybe not. Dependable was hurting for workers at the moment.

" _Blessings_ upon you, R-Series 6625."

He had come to the front of the line, and found himself looking up at the most beautiful Cybertronian he had ever seen. Granted, he his frame of reference was limited, since most of the mechs he knew were other members R-Series. Later, he would find Tarn handsome, Starscream elegant, and Vos exciting; but Melody was _beautiful_. She was pale blue, with white wisps on her door wings that looked like clouds. In her root-mode, all of her glass was concentrated into a secondary set of wings that laid just under the first, like some exotic organic beetle (not that he currently had a frame of reference for that either). Sparkles has been mixed into the outer layers of her paint, and she seemed to radiate a light glow. In the center of her forehelm, she'd had a stylized Matrix installed. It looked like gold, but orichalcum wasn't out of her financial reach. On her desk sat a picture of Sentinel Prime, facing outwards, towards the line of drones.

 _Fuck_.

Of all the dispensers, Melody was the worst. 

She was ostensibly a member of Management, but her real desire was to be a priestess of Augmentus at the House of Sparks Ascendant. She, like every other forged mech, had been promised a grand destiny when she was pulled from the Well - something more fulfilling than dispensing low-grade energon to slaves - and every year she had a new excuse as to why it hadn't been realized yet. 

The priestesses were all _jealous_ of how bad she made them look, with her efforts to bring the teachings of Augmentus Prime to the _drones_. They had _already_ recruited to many new mechs this year. It was the _courier drones_ , they hadn't taken her application in _quickly_ enough (it was why she never tipped them!). The current _Canoness_ secretly had it in for her because _all jets were shapist_.

Overload thought it might be the fact that she was goddamn fucking insane. She was prone to withholding energon if a drone didn't greet her with a quote from Augmentus' writings or a prayer. She kept track of who attended the weekly devotion and mechs who didn't tended to get sent away from the dispensing station with nothing more than an encouragement to be more pious. 

He didn't like his chances. He never went to the devotion. The slagging Primes already owned him, what else did they want? Worship? Fuck that.

You had to be a special kind of crazy to declare yourself the head of a state religion.

One of the old crew leaders, before Redcap, had infamously told Melody that Augmentus could suck his spike. Depending on who you asked, or the mood (and sobriety) of the mech telling the story, he'd also flashed the organ in question at her. Overload wasn't sure which version he believed, but people did crazy things when they were starving. 

She'd been so distraught that she had to take three months off work - praying continuously for the crew leader's spark, or so she claimed. As for the crew leader, he'd never gotten his energon, and the little outburst had landed him on the continuous crew. According to Payroll, Melody was the one who who had signed the order.

So much for the Soul of Earth being beneficent and all-forgiving.

Even as he was trying to think of something he might say to appease her, he wondered what Augmentus would think of her little fan club, if she were still online.

"Praise Augmentus, I want my enegon," was what he finally settled on as he held out his arm to be scanned. He tried not to imagine blasting the picture of Sentinel off her desk with a power surge. As satisfying as it would be, even at full energy levels, it probably wouldn't make it past the security screen.

"I haven't _seen_ you at the _devotion_ ," she said as she retrieved a cube and set on the counter, just behind the security screen. The sight of it sent a surge of angry longing through his tanks, and Overload told himself not to look at it. Instead he forced himself to look up at Melody's face. Her expression was an artful mix piety and condescension. "Will you be _attending_ this week?"

"Yes?"

"Oh, _good_ ," she cooed. Her hand coming to rest lightly on the top of the glittering cube. "Then you can have _this_ when I see you at the _chapel_."

"I'm not going to make it there if you don't give me my energon!" Overload regretted the words as soon as they were out of his vocalizer, and Melody's eyes narrowed at him.

"This _isn't_ about me, 6625. It's about _you_. You need to _think_ about the future." She leaned over the counter, one hand still on the cube. "How will you be _accepted_ into the Afterspark with when you're _stained_ with the sins of Malleus Prime? You _do_ want to go to the Afterspark, don't you?"

 _No, and the Primes can suck my fucking spike_. Even as the defiant thought welled up in his processor, he pushed it back down and reigned in his fields. He couldn't. If he had an outburst, she might close the station. That way, even if he didn't starve to death, the other mechs in line would help him along. Instead he nodded, trying his best to look meek and contrite.

"Think about _Augmentus_ and her plan for you and we can talk about it at the _devotion_ ," Melody trilled and shooed him with her free hand, even as he imagined blasting that Matrix decoration right out of her face. " _Suffering_ will help to cleanse your Spark."

There was nothing to do but let his hands fall to his side as he backed away from the station. He was humiliated, but he'd be damned if her let her see it, and he vowed not to hug his midsection as he left.

\------------

Overload didn't offline the next day, but being online was a fresh kind of agony. Someone had once told him that it took so long to starve to death that you'd wish it were shorter, and he found he didn't disagree. His systems screamed warnings at him until he disabled everything non-essential and even then they were persistent in disrupting his recharge cycle. There was nothing to do but lay on his berth and hope he didn't black out or suffer a catastrophic shutdown. The pain was usually constant, but every so often it would knife upwards through his internals and leave him convulsing. He was awake in the middle of the night when his comm pinged him.

\-- middleMarches [MM] sent lightningBug [LB] a message! --

MM: so.  
MM: heard melody was working the station yesterday. :|  
MM: how bad was it?  
LB: cap  
LB: it was about as bad it could have been  
MM: i'm guessing you didn't get any fuel.  
MM: so quick question, plus a followup.  
MM: what are you willing to do to get some?  
MM: and can you still walk?  
LB: at this point  
LB: anything????  
LB: if i have to blow you for energon that can happen but im pretty woozy and it might be sloppy  
LB: also i think so  
MM: perfect. get off your berth, and come meet me near the lower level gate.

He was at seven percent as he swung his legs down off the berth. It was perilously close to automatic shutdown, but he decided he'd rather die than pray to Primus not to let him offline in the hallway. The lower level gate was in the bowels of the power planet, but he knew the way. Pulling up his internal maps would just waste power, and he had to concentrate just to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It took longer than he would have liked, and he skirted the areas where he might run into a security patrol. Workers weren't technically confined to their apartment, but there would be questions he didn't have answers to.

Redcap was waiting for him, leaning against the wall and trying to look conspiratorial. Considering her paint job, she was failing completely. "You look like slag," she said as he approached.

"I feel worse," he said. "Hope you don't actually want your spike sucked, because I'm not feeling it."

"You might wish that's what I wanted, when you see where we're going." Redcap took him by the arm and steadied him, and they went down together, to the bottom of the world.


	3. The Key

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a pretty large cast of OC's in BaS, and while I get that people don't like them, I'm trying to avoid the opposite syndrome of having everyone Kaon meets be an important canonical character. It should probably also be noted that I took a lot of names from randomizers or just used what seemed cool/appropriate. Overload is Kaon's nickname, for example, and it's not related to the RiD character.
> 
> What can I say, all the good names were taken.

If, in his current situation, someone had tried to explain to Overload what empurata was, he wouldn't have understood or cared. It was a complicated process that involved doctors, and surgeries, and replacement parts, and all of those things cost shanix. Dependable Power would never have paid for it - drones got no medical attention beyond the bare minimum that was legally required. 

...but every mech who worked there feared the threat of being put on the continuous crew. 

The continuous crew were transformers who had their t-cogs excised while they were locked in their alt-mode. Then they were painted black, attached to the Array, and fed through injectors until they finally died. The thought of those mechs chained to the underside of the Array, faceless and immobile and voiceless, nothing more than conduits so that the Cybertronians above could live comfortably, it made his spark twist in its chamber.

Partly because he knew it was where he was going to end up. His owners thought he had a bad attitude.

It was where they were going now, taking a winding route through the dark underbelly of the power plant to reach the bottom of the Array. Overload had disabled his chronometer to save power, but the trip hadn't been short, and he was hovering on the edge of stasis. It was a challenge just to keep going, and he was relying on Redcap for support far more than he would have liked. 

They passed other mechs occasionally, the minibots who were cleaning or hauling away refuse, a pair of mechs making out in a dark corner. No one paid any attention to them. It was doubtful the security patrols came down here, and since Redcap didn't seem afraid he resolved that he wouldn't be either.

"How much do you know about our father?" She asked, breaking the silence in the most awkward way possible.

"Our... father?"

"Malleus Prime," said Redcap, helpfully.

Overload rattled his plating. "I know who Malleus Prime is!"

Overload wasn't sure what she was getting at, and he was uncomfortably reminded of Melody. Only this time he couldn't afford not to say or do what she wanted. If she left him alone in the dark corridors below the plant, he'd offline. Malleus had come before the Twin Suns, and he'd been assassinated by Sentinel, his student. "He was a fucking pile of scrap?"

"...and a fucking liar," said Redcap. "We were being deceived," and if she was worrying him before, her voice had taken on a tone of near-religious reverence. "Our sparks came from the Well."

"How... can you know that?" He winced, but kept himself upright. "Why would the Prime lie to us?"

They had apparently come to where they were going, because Redcap eased him back against a ladder set into the wall. He transferred his weight over to it and she let him go. 

As he thought, they were on the underside of the Array. From where they stood, he could see the hollows of the main lightning channel and the whorls of power dancing inside it. Lattices of blue wires formed pulsing patterns throughout the interior, looking like the biolights of some great Cybertronian, though the Array was not alive. Below them, it extended deep into the planet's crust. Above them it reached high into the sky, just barely sub-atmospheric. 

From below, it collected the excess power shed by the immortal sparks of the Great Patropolii and Exalted Matropolii. From above, it swept the atmosphere for solar and lunar lightning. Both types of power were drawn into the main channel where Overload and thousands of other drones labored to process it into a usable form. 

Electricity was used to power virtually everything on Cybertron that didn't run on energon. A stopgap to prevent fuel shortages that had been implemented fifteen millennia ago by a Council ruling Cyberton in lieu of a Prime. There were many other Arrays in various locations across the planet, each one tapping into the heart of a Titan via the planetary leylines. He rarely saw it from this angle, but he had to admit it was impressive.

In slots set into the Array were the frames of the continuous crew. Their alt-modes weren't any different from his or Redcap's, and they were hardly elegant. The standard alt-mode for an R-Series drone looked like nothing more than a barrel with coils, traditionally red and yellow, the company colours, though the continuous crew was painted matte black. 

Overload couldn't count them - only one section of the channel was visible to him, but there had to be at least a thousand in this segment alone. 

"Why wouldn't he--" she began, her tone rising again. 

"So either way I have to sit through a sermon to eat?" He snapped, glancing back at Redcap. The inside of his mouth felt dry, like brittle metal. It wasn't so much fear as it was that his body had given up on producing oral lubricant. "You brought me down here because you said you had energon. Do you have it or not? Because if you don't, I could have offlined just as fucking easily and much more comfortably in my berth!"

The hunger pangs weren't any less agonizing, but they were easier to ignore when he was angry.

"Oh, I have it," she said, gesturing around. "We can get as much energon as we want." 

As it dawned on him, it seemed like such a simple solution he cursed at himself for not thinking of it. Easing himself up from the ladder, he reached for the feeding tube of the nearest transformer. He didn't know if would attach to his arm port, but he was beyond caring. If there was energon spilled on the floor, he probably would have licked it up.

"No," said Redcap, as she spun something out of her subspace and offered it to him. "The feeding attachments have alarms."

It was a siphoning syringe. 

"I--" Overload stared at it. He'd seen medical tools only rarely, and Primus knew where'd she gotten it. His memories of coming online were fuzzy, but he'd seen them cut dead R-Series drones out of the Array before. Maybe she'd snagged it then. 

The enormity of what she was implying stunned him. "It's already gone through an intake. Redcap, it's the Great Taboo."

"So?"

"We can't--"

"Do you want to live?"

_Yes_ , he realized. _I do_. His hands weren't steady, but he reached for the syringe. Maybe the continuous crew couldn't feel anything. Maybe they disconnected their brain modules when they attached them. The lie was pointless, he didn't think he cared. Their lives were over and his wasn't, it was as simple as that.

It took him three tries to get it right, and the mech didn't react once he finally got the syringe under their plating. The transformer's fields were unreadable and lax, and they had probably taken out its vocalizer when they took its t-cog. He drew out the energon slowly, about a quarter of a cube. Each moment, he was sure an alarm would sound, but none did. The feeding tubes were more valuable to the company than the lives of its workers. 

The energon wasn't pure, not by any estimation of purity, there were swirls of oil and internal fluids clinging to the surface like an obscene film and it looked thicker than it should be. Revulsion crawled across him, like insects picking over his plating, but it wasn't nearly as strong as the hunger pangs. Or it might have been Redcap's fields, dancing with anticipation so bright it was almost visual. Overload held it up his lips, trying to will himself to drink. He'd be damned for breaking the Taboo, but he already was, wasn't he? Why not be comfortable? 

There were no catastrophic revelations when he steeled himself and tilted the cube up to this lips to drink. No Voidborn appearing to drag him screaming down to Hell or visions of Primus uttering condemnations. It was just energon, and while it probably tasted foul and brackish, he couldn't tell. His frame welcomed it like it was a flute of the finest high-grade ever produced. The pain of fuel abruptly hitting his tanks when he had been so close to stasis wasn't comparable to the sudden relief as his energy levels lifted out of the red. The aftertaste was tacky and bitter on his glossa, but he found himself wanting more. 

"Have you done this before?" He asked, looking up at Redcap.

She nodded to him, her fields full of swirling glee. "Plenty of times. You get used to the taste."

"Where... did you get the syringe? Did you steal it?"

"No," she said, her optics shining as she cupped his cheeks. "A gift, from the Emperor. Do you want one?"

"Cybertron has an Emperor?"

She grinned, a flash of dental chips, all painted red. "It's going to."


	4. The Pillar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ratchet is in this one.

"Now," said Ratchet, sweeping his optics across the packed lecture hall, "We were discussing Ignitions."

There were about five hundred mechs in attendance, and half again that number in assistant drones. Students were assigned one drone, usually a dataslate or archivist, when their admission was accepted. Wealthy students, or those with educational sponsors sometimes had more. 

His gaze fell on an empty seat, and the fancy looking drone who was sitting beside it, furiously taking notes.

Not again.

"There are three types of Ignitions," he continued, resolving to deal with it after the lecture, "but for now, we'll focus on those sparks that emerge from the Well. This is where the sparks of the Forged come from, which would include myself and all of you."

He gestured, bringing up a holographic projection. It displayed Iacon, to the south of the Well, and Vos, on the northeast shore. It zoomed in, focusing on the Well itself. "While the upper levels of the Well have been accurately mapped, the All-Spark creates so much energy that the lower levels are unstable--" He looked up as a student pinged him with a query. "Neon?"

"Unstable, professor?"

"Yes, unstable. The closer we get to the All-Spark, the less we can rely on the normal conventions of time, space, and matter. The lowest levels of the Well are inaccessible to us mortals, and phenomenally dangerous to the Primes. If you want a better understanding of the precise physics of it, Perceptor can--"

There was an audible groan that carried throughout the hall.

"Ah," Ratchet grinned. "I see that some of your are already taking his class." He turned the hologram, conjuring a stylized image of the All-Spark, and had it release a point of light, to represent a spark. "Moving on, when a spark emerges it travels upwards from the Well, As it travels it gathers the four basic elements of creation - all of them present in abundance within the Well - around itself. Does anyone want to name them for the class?"

"Glass?" Someone in the back of the hall guessed, with "Gold!" and "Steel," added quickly before the room descended into random guessing and mumbling.

"Anyone else?" Ratchet scanned the room again. "Click?"

The fancy little drone who was present without her owner cringed and tried to sink down into her seat. Ratchet immediately regretted calling attention to her, because half the class was staring, but he was damned if her owner was going to pull this slag again. It was even worse that he was getting Click to cover for him. The mech was absolutely shameless.

"Tears," she said, meekly, her voice tinny.

"Correct," Ratchet said, changing the hologram and drawing the attention of the class back to him. "The spark gathers materials until it reaches critical mass and undergoes a reaction we call Ignition. This is a singular moment of creation, transmutation from a pile of parts to a living, sentient being. The brain module and t-cog come online and connect with the spark. Glass becomes adamant, the tears of the Patropolii and Matropolii titans become protoflesh, and gold becomes orichalcum - which forms the spark chamber." He paused, but there were no questions. "Orichalcum is found nowhere else in the universe. Other than Ignition within the Well, no other force is powerful enough to produce it. The presence of orichalcum in the spark chamber is one of the ways, medically speaking, that we would identify a patient as Forged--"

There was a querying ping, and Ratchet looked up. "Yes, Rainwing, what is it?"

Rainwing was sitting three rows from the front, a sleek Vosian jet who might have looked better if his face hadn't been twisted into a perpetual sneer. He had patterns in his paint, like raindrops, and Ratchet guessed it was custom work instead of his natural coloring.

"Why," said Rainwing, who sounded amused, "would we need to worry about that? When would we have a patient who _wasn't_ Forged? If your drone breaks, you can just replace it."

Ratchet frowned, and he knew his disapproval had reached his fields, but he certainly didn't care. "Even from purely a pragmatic point of view, young mech, that doesn't make sense. What if a drone had important information about a military target but needed repairs? And it's not unheard of for a Senator or Noble to have a beloved companion. Beyond that, some of us aren't complete afts, and we recognize all life as precious." He locked optics with the jet. "That sort of thing might fly in Vos, but it won't in my classroom. If you don't want to learn how to repair constructed mechs, you can find a new professor."

Rainwing frowned, but nodded to him. The jet's wings tilted down in what Ratchet recognized as a gesture of submission. "Sorry, sir."

He hoped that he was. "Moving on," he said, turning back to the projection, "in this section of the course, we're going to focus on protoflesh - which is the most vulnerable aspect of our frame. We'll be discussing its compsition, the most common afflictions assocaited with it, the makeup of various synthetic replacements--"

It was another two hours before he dismissed the class, and he kept one optic on Click as she slid out of her seat and tried to get to the door by scrambling between the pedes of taller mechs.

\-- medicAlert [MA] sent andDrag [AD] a message! --

MA: Not you, Click.  
MA: Where's your owner?  
AD: He's... not feeling well? He said couldn't come to class today.  
AD: He said to give you his regards and he wants me to bring him the notes.  
MA: Is he in jail? 

There was a very long pause, and the dataslate stood there, wringing her hands as students streamed past her. 

AD: ...yes.

Ratchet pinched the bridge of his nose, fighting down a processor ache. 

MA: My office, right now.

Click was a standard Academy drone, a minibot whether she was being classified by size or weight, and at her full height, she reached just higher than Ratchet's waist. Academy drones were given to new students to help them manage their schedules, assist with homework, take notes, and generally make sure they didn't burn down the dormitories (assuming the student hadn't moved off-campus). Learning to manage and deal with owned mechs was seen as a life skill for those in the high castes, and it was supposed to help with that too.

Students were allowed (and indeed, expected) to take their personal drones with them when they graduated. Click's first owner had been an engineer who had taken a position on a colony eighty light-years from Cybertron. He'd become so frustrated with the paperwork and fees and licenses involved in trying to take Click off-world that he'd returned her to the school. She had been distraught, but the Academy had eventually reassigned her. 

Her second owner had up and left her behind when he graduated. Click had been waiting for him in his dormitory room until she'd nearly starved, and apparently the mech hadn't told her he was leaving. He hadn't even bothered to fill out the paperwork required to release her back to the school. If she'd been distraught before, she had been inconsolable this time. Ratchet still remembered her clinging to his arm begging him to believe her that _this_ time she'd done everything right.

Considering that between the medical examination when she'd been released by her previous owner and this one her seals had been broken, he didn't like to speculate on what she meant by that. 

He had, at one point, resolved to just buy her from the Academy and let her live with him. Destiny, he supposed, had other plans, because following a shortage at the plant that produced her Series, she'd ended up reassigned a third time.

"Have a seat, Click," he said, as she stepped inside. He went to the private dispenser and drew a small cube of energon from it, setting it in front of her on the desk. She took it, but didn't drink, and stashed it in her subspace. If she was full, Ratchet took that as a good sign.

"Am I in trouble?" Click asked, after a moment of silence. 

"No, Click, you're not." Ratchet vented heavily, taking a seat opposite her. "--but you're supposed to be an educational assistant, not a partner in crime!"

"I'm sorry!" She gripped the edge of the desk. "He called me right before class and asked me to go for him!"

" _That's_ what he used his one comm call on!?"

"Er, well... he _did_ ask me to send his regards to you, professor."

"Unbelievable--!" Ratchet began, but had to stop for the moment - his comm was crowding his HUD with messages, both personal, urgent, or a combination of both. It wasn't unusual, considering how highly he was sought after as a teacher. Students requesting extensions, lab hours, project approvals, or one-on-one time. Other teachers and faculty members who wanted his opinion on something. A seemingly endless roll of reminders about policy meetings he was expected to attend and had no intention of going to. A quick scan indicated that none of them were from Perceptor, so he disabled the link. One thing at a time.

"I suppose he asked you to come bail him out too?" He rubbed the side of his helm with one servo. He was getting old.

Click's shoulders slumped. "Yes, professor."

"Then we're going to do that together," Ratchet said. "Where is he?"

\------------ 

Overload felt better than he ever had.

Three months after his revelation in the underbelly of the Array, a new batch of drones came online and Dependable eased the work back to a comfortable one-hundred hours. It no longer bothered him, not with his energy levels being what they were . Healthy Cybertronians were perfectly capable of handing the workload and for the first time in his life, he was healthy. How long he would _stay_ that way while he was ingesting siphoned energon at the rate he was, he wasn't sure. Redcap seemed fine, and she'd been doing it longer than he had.

She was part of a revolutionary group, or so she claimed. One that would tear down the Council and the Twin Suns, raise the rightful Emperor in their place, and free the drones. He had agreed to pay lip service to it, mostly to get his own syringe. He wasn't sure if he was a true believer, like Redcap was. At times, she seemed to regard her so-called Emperor with a sort of religious reverence. 

The only real hangup was only the nagging, persistent fear that he was going to get caught.

...so when he returned to his room one night and saw a Seeker waiting in the hallway outside his door, he very nearly panicked. Later, he would learn that 'Seeker' meant a very specific thing, and the title didn't apply to mass-produced drone jets - but at the moment, the only fliers he had ever seen had been on holovids. To Overload, the tall, slender bot seemed dangerous, mysterious, and almost impossibly exotic. The jet was painted black and gold, and he was leaning against the wall, reading from a datapad while he waited, flicking his wings.

There was no time to do anything, and when Overload turned the corner, he looked up. "R-Series, 6625?"

"Yes?" Overload's optics flicked over the jet's plating, looking for some kind of identifying mark. He knew the badge the Dependable security officers wore, but this mech didn't have one. Instead, he had a badge welded over the center of his chestplates that looked like a pair of wings crossed over each other. It was the same gold-black as his paint. Engraved along the bottom of the badge was a stylized glyph that read 'RUNNER'. "Runner?"

"I'm a courier, that's my license," the mech said, his tone patient. He gestured for Overload's arm, to scan it. "I have a package for you."

He wondered if it was something Redcap had set up. She liked to claim that her group could reach anywhere on Cybertron, but he already had the syringe, so what else could it be?

"It's from..." he checked a readout on his arm. "L-Series, A-5894? Friend of yours?"

Overload blinked. "Payroll?"

Drones at Dependable _technically_ received a paycheck, though they weren't allowed to leave the area immediately surrounding the Array and they couldn't buy energon. After deductions, there was just barely enough to buy a few distractions, holovids, posters, or maybe a handful of candy. Payroll made more than he did, he was an accountant's assistant, not a manual laborer, but even then, hiring a courier seemed like an outrageous expense. Had Payroll liked him enough to send him a present? He had never been given anything before (discounting the syringe), and for a moment, he couldn't process.

"I want whatever it is," he said, holding out his arm and letting the courier scan it.

The jet chuckled. "Sure thing, buddy." He cleared the scan and popped something out of his subspace and handed it over. It was a small piece of black metal, just barely the size of Overload's thumb. 

Overload frowned, turning it over it in his hands. "What the fuck _is_ it?"

"Looks like a dataslug, should read on most processors. You just connect to it like it was a commlink and read the message, can't reply though." That was the all technical support he got, because the jet turned on his heel and left, rounding the corner and disappearing out of the habs.

He let himself into his apartment, which was functional but hardly glamorous. There were berths on opposite walls, a tiny washrack meant to be shared between two mechs, a pair of shelves on either wall (and he'd long ago appropriated all of his dead roommate's things), a computer the belonged to Dependable (mostly used for getting messages from Management), and a small table that he sent the dataslug down on. He found himself wishing for something more exciting, but he was curious. Maybe he could scrape together enough shanix to reply. He'd have to send a message through the planetary uplink, he could never afford a private courier, but he could at least let Payroll know he was doing okay. It took a moment to find the right frequency, but he connected to it.

\-- luckyNumber [LN] sent lightningBug [LB] a message! --

LN: ...  
LN: ...  
LN: ...  
LN: ...  
LN: ...

That was it. It was empty.

Overload rolled his optics and groaned. Either Payroll had jobbed up his message or the courier had damaged it. The jet was fucking gone too, there was no way to call him back and yell at him. He flopped back onto his berth, disappointed, and stayed that way a while. Though, if Payroll wanted to talk to him, there was no reason not to send a message of his own, and he sat back up to compose it.

\-- lightningBug [LB] sent luckyNumber [LN] a message! --

LB: payroll youre a goddamn dumbaft  
LB: primuses bearings  
LB: you cant even send a message properly  
LB: anyways works sucks and we kinda miss you

Perfect.

He slid into the chair by his computer and connected to the planetary datanet. It took a full hour of navigating to find a useful messaging service, which in this case meant 'one that was free and open to drones', and another hour to figure out how to search for addresses in Iacon. 'Payroll' and 'Payroll, of Iacon', it seemed, were fairly common names. The first searches returned thousands upon thousands of results. He tried to refine it to drones, then to drones working in one of the Arrays, and then he linked it to Payroll's official designation.

[Commlink Inactive.]

Something was wrong. He didn't know what it was, but something was wrong.


	5. The Peacock

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, there's a lot of stuff about the doctors. Tarn needs a lot of medical attention and he's eventually going to get around to messing up all their lives.

Overload showed the dataslug to Redcap and she agreed with him. It didn't make them any more able to help Payroll, but she agreed with him.

"Can't, I don't know, you and your revolutionaries at least go knock on his door or something?" It was endlessly frustrating. The world outside the Array had always seemed pointlessly huge and dangerous to Overload, but he looked it up and taking a train to the outskirts of Iacon was only an eight-hour trip. So much closer than he thought. Not that he could afford a ticket, or that he was allowed to leave company property.

"It doesn't fucking work like that," Redcap said. "The Decepticons have to operate in secret. They have a lot of enemies and they don't make house calls."

 _Decepticons_. So they had a name.

"Maybe he's sick," she went on, "or maybe he had to change his commsign, or maybe they got this designation number wrong."

 _It's possible_ , Overload had to admit. _But it doesn't explain the empty dataslug_. Had it been tampered with? 

He had the nagging feeling that Payroll had sent it so someone would try and respond and discover he was missing. If he had just wanted to catch up with his old friend, he could have sent the message through an uplink more easily and cheaper.

None of it, absolutely none of it, changed the fact that he was helpless. He couldn't report Payroll's disappearance to the Management, Dependable Power no longer owned his contract and they wouldn't care if there were no losses to recoup. The company that had purchased Payroll, Consolidated Energy, were the ones who had caused the disappearance in the first place. To make matters worse, if he started causing a fuss, they might decide they'd had enough of him and he'd end up on the continuous crew. Redcap would find a new co-conspirator, and that mech would eat him.

It made him feel like lashing out and breaking something.

...and there had to be _something_ he could do, because anything would have would have been better than waiting around helplessly.

\------------

Ratchet had done more work on Prowl than he cared at admit.

In his spark of sparks, he was an abolitionist, and the plight of the drones weighed on him heavily. The situation on Cybertron was untenable, but a case for the total abolishment of slavery (and slavery was what it was) would have to be built carefully. The Senate and the upper castes benefited immensely from drone labor, and they would knock it down if the foundations weren't rock solid.

Identifying a psychic or clear point one percenter among the drone masses would have been a first step towards getting the Senate to admit their sparks were equal to those of the Forged. Ratchet had tested hundreds, if not thousands of mechs with sparks from the Vaults. He had started with the ones he had easy access too, the Academy assistants and the patients at his clinic in the Dead End, only to find nothing. He had expanded to the hospital staff, the nursing aides, and faculty assistants and specialists - only to turn up empty servos each time.

It was because of his students and their occasional trouble with the law that he had met Prowl and heard about his 'magic processor'. They'd met socially a few times - not quite dates, since they both had other commitments, and Prowl eventually concluded that letting Ratchet run his tests didn't violate any department rules.

Prowl, as it turned out, wasn't magic. He was a genius - he cleared the mental proficiency tests with ease, and he was getting a fair bit more out of his processor than Ratchet would have thought possible, but he wasn't psychic. He also wasn't a point one percenter, not by any measurement. His spark was strongly suited to the work he was doing, his artificial Ignition had been cleanly done, and the bond to his frame was excellent, but that was it.

It was a disappointment, but Ratchet had resolved to keep searching. The results of Prowl's tests were something he kept hidden in a secret file. The Senate already liked to point out that if a drone worked hard or diligently enough, they could buy their freedom. He didn't want anyone basing that estimation on Prowl, the odds stacked against a drone's freedom were already far to high, and Prowl had simply gotten very lucky.

"He's over here," Prowl said, striding down the line of holding cells and glancing back at Ratchet and Click.

Knock Out had a way of making even in the inside of a cell look fashionable. He was half laying on the bench, one arm thrown up over his helm, his fields relaxed, reading from a datapad he had retrieved out of his subspace. Click smiled meekly waved to him.

"Ratchet!" Knock Out sat up, his thin lipplates curling up into a smile. "...and I see you brought Click with you. Good of you, to take care of her while I was... indisposed. Hello, Click. You look wonderful today."

The palm of Ratchet's servo itched with the urge to slap some sense into him, and Click looked at her pedes, her fields flushing.

"He was caught street-racing," Prowl said flatly, deactivating the lock and powering down the containment field open before adding, " _Again_. Speeding, trespassing, reckless endangerment. He's not being _charged_ , so I can release him into your custody, professor."

Of course he wasn't being charged. The police could arrest Knock Out and hold him for a time, but the reality of the situation was that his student was in such a high caste he outranked most of the police force. Unless he committed a crime against another free mech, their servos were tied.

"Thank you, Prowl," Ratchet kept his optics locked on Knock Out, willing him to feel some sort of remorse or responsibility for his actions, but it was an exercise in futility.

The racer breezed out of the cell, barely glancing at Prowl as he lifted Click up and let her rest against his shoulder.

Ratchet had been nervous at first, when he had seen Knock Out and Click together. Especially on the first day of classes, when Knock Out had swept into the room with a completely remodeled Click sitting on his arm. She had been entirely repainted, polished and detailed, with a new datapad mounted on her arm and a bevy of other attachments that Ratchet didn't recognize. 'My assistant', he had said, as he showed her off, 'should look as good as I do'. She had been entirely charmed by him, the way most people were when they met Knock Out.

He would have asked how a student could afford all those upgrades, but Knock Out _also_ had over a hundred educational sponsors. Representatives from various companies or noble houses who paid him to attend school, typically in exchange for future employment or service. Historically speaking, only one of Ratchet's students had ever attracted more attention from the nobility, but _he_ was a whole separate issue.

"You're in trouble," Ratchet grumbled. "Let's go."

"Primus, _no_." Knock Out touched the center of his chestplates with one clawed hand, feigning shock. 

"We'll discuss this back on campus, Knock Out."

Even if their ages had been comparable, Ratchet could never have kept pace with a racer, but at least his student was courteous enough to drive the speed limit as they headed back towards the Academy. He kept Knock Out in sight as they merged onto the skyway.

\-- finishLine [FL] sent medicAlert [MA] a message! --

FL: Now, Ratchet, _before_ you get mad--  
MA: I'm _already_ mad!  
MA: What were you thinking!?  
FL: Professor, come on, racing is a victimless crime.  
MA: You don't even know what you're talking about.  
MA: You've never had to scrape some poor mech off the street after he crashed, or... or seen what's left of some poor racer who got pushed into drug running!  
MA: And do not even get me started on involving poor Click in this... this crime spree!  
FL: Primus on His throne, Ratchet, I'm not going to get _captured_ and forced to run drugs. That happens to precisely no one.  
FL: It sounds fake. It sounds like something old mechs make up to scare sparklings. And it's not a crime spree!  
MA: It could happen!  
FL: Ratchet! I'm just having fun, and I really don't see the harm in it.  
MA: Your sponsors would see the harm in it.  
FL: You're... not going to say anything, are you?  
MA: Knock Out, you're talented, and the worst part of that is that you know it.  
MA: I don't like to see you wasting your potential gallivanting around like this. You need to learn that actions have consequences.  
MA: If you want to stay in my program, you're going to have to convince me of that by doing some extra work.  
MA: You can come by my clinic every night after school this quarter and assist me there, _or_ I can have a chat with your sponsors about your _other_ extra curricular activities.  
FL: That's tyrannical.  
FL: Buuuuuuut as far wanting to be a mech sought after by the rich and famous, I suppose that working at a private practice for Cybertron's most famous surgeon will look good on my job applications.

He would have smirked, if he had a mouth in his alt-mode. Instead, he commed Knock Out the address and watched the racer sputter over the comm. 

FL: There must be some mistake. Your private practice is in the _Dead End_?  
FL: It's where all the homeless mechs live.  
MA: You're reading it right. Every night, Knock Out.

He pulled into the faculty building, leaving Knock Out behind on the street.


	6. The List Keeper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kaon and Redcap decide to attempt the art of 'seduction'.

Overload started making a list. That was something.

It was hard at first, most of his actual work involved being attached to the Array, and he had seldom needed to read or write. Whole sub-sections of his processor had shut down from disuse and starvation, but with his energy levels consistently above eighty percent, they were starting to come back online and form new connections. More than once, he had to go back, scrap what he'd already done, and start over from nothing. All the while boggling at the infantile logical leaps he'd been making.

He deleted everything on the dataslug he kept on his subspace and used that for recording The List. At the time, he didn't know it, but dataslugs and couriers were popular among mechs with money because the slugs didn't have any kind of linking capabilities - making them difficult to scan for and impossible to hack from afar. So while he lived in fear of being caught with it, he had no idea just how unlikely it was.

It was five weeks before he made progress, and another two weeks before he had anything reliably usable. 

The List included the names of everyone who had been taken. In a previous iteration he'd added notes for if they'd volunteered to go or not, and the current one had sub-categories for any other information he thought might be useful. By the time he was moving forward, he had diligently copied it out and refined it seventeen times. It was a continuous work in progress. Asking people about missing friends and shift partners, seeing which crew leaders had been replaced and which hadn't, checking to see which types of worker had been put into the lottery. Once Overload was confident it was workable, he had four thousand, six hundred, and thirty-two names on it (plus his notes) and he was only using a tiny fraction of the slug's memory capabilities.

If it was going to help or not, he didn't know, but it was better than sitting on his aft doing nothing. 

...and if he was being truthful to himself, it helped him justify siphoning from the continuous crew. He rationalized it by telling himself that if their positions were reversed, he would want justice too.

Whenever he had free time, he analyzed to The List and tried to find patterns. He liked to do it right after his shift, when there was still solar lightning and the remnants of a Titan's energy field caught inside his frame, it helped him think. 

Unfortunately, the only conclusion that he came to was that there was no conclusion to come to. Maybe the other three thousand, three hundred, and sixty-eight names would have helped, and he added new ones every day, but everything was taking so _long_ and he wanted answers _now_. Overload wished there was someone to teach him how to make numbers make sense, but tutors might as well have exotic beasts from the galactic rim. 

He had never thought of himself as a sociable mech, and he had never wanted to be. Not when he was aching and exhausted all the time. Now he had to chat with everyone, and while his early forays into getting people to open up had been disasters, he kept at it. Not so much for the Decepticons, but for Payroll, and for himself.

It was Melody, oddly enough, who cracked the code.

These days, Overload didn't have any idea how to deal with her. Now that she had no power over him, he didn't have to feign peity to please her. On the other hand, if she figured out that he wasn't afraid of being sent away with nothing, she might alert the Management. Most days, he adopted a mien of false worry and hoped she would take no notice of him one way or the other.

So when he came to the corner and found her wearing a mourning mask and full greiver paint, he was at a loss.

Griever paint and mourning masks were traditionally for Calibration, the holiday at the end of the year that mourned the death of Solus Prime and coincided with Megatronus' five-day rule of the planet. Calibration ended on the New Dawn, the first day of the Cybertronian year, when Augmentus had killed her brother, avenged Solus, and given her very spark to banish Unicron back into the Void. 

Overload didn't own a mourning mask (he owned basically nothing, truth be told). Those were expensive. He had some griever paint, because while Dependable Power had no qualms about working an owned mech to death, even _they_ respected the Calibration. At the end of the year, the Array was closed and powered down for five days, during which the mechs who worked there were allowed to celebrate however they saw fit. 

It made sense. Calibration was a time of unpredictable malfunctions, glitches, random breakdowns, and general bad luck. It was said the Unicron could exert the most influence over the physical universe during the Calibration, and if you believed it, his sparkless Voidborn creations stalked the surface of Cybertron, looking for victims. 

Long ago, the masks and paint and ceased to belong exclusively to the holiday and become a sign of personal tragedy. When Building Nine had burned down, the handful of survivors had worn griever paint for months. Mechs sometimes wore one or the other when they lost their cojunx or amica endura. Even Sentinel, the Lord Prime, had been wearing griever paint when he had made a holoscreen appearance to announce Malleus' death. 

Did Melody have a cojunx? Overload realized knew next to nothing about her, other than her name and that she thought she should be a priestess. She had a whole life of her own, somewhere away from the Array, and he didn't know a single thing about it.

"Uh..." he said, resting his servos on the edge of he counter and peering over it, "...are you alright, Melody?"

One of Melody's servos shot through the security field and gripped his. Before he could protest, she jerked it back through and pressed it to her chestplates. He knew he couldn't keep the panic out of his fields, and he braced himself for the pain when the field would engage and cut his arm off at the joint, but it didn't. 

" _All those sparks!_ " She wailed. 

_Merciful fucking Primus, thank you for not blowing my arm off_. He struggled to calm down. She was perfectly capable of engaging the field manually - he was pretty sure there was a silent alarm, and his arm was still through it. 

"I'm.... uh... really sorry about them, Melody." He had no idea what she was taking about, but it seemed like the right reaction. Even at nearly full energy levels, she was probably stronger than he was, not that he dared to try and jerk his hand free. "What happened?"

"There was an _accident_ , while they were being transported to the Array, on the _skyway_."

 _Transported?_ But that meant--

"Okay, but if they weren't Ignited, what's the big deal?"

Melody tensed, and she looked down at him like he was something unclean. " _Light_ is life," she said, flinging him away. "And _life_ is light."

Overload slammed his servo down on the cube of energon waiting on her counter and yanked it back through the field.

It didn't engage. 

All in all, a pretty good day.

\------------

"I need the rest of the names for my list," he told Redcap, "and I know how to get them."

"You figured that out while you were feeling up the dispenser?"

"No," he said, "and also _no_. I think I already know why they were taken, but I need all the names. We need to get up to the records office and get them. I know how we can get past the security fields, I figured _that_ part out while I was feeling up Melody."

"Oh?" Redcap raised one of her eyeridges. "Do tell."

"She pulled me through it, and not just that. It was intuitive enough to know that since someone let me pass, I could pull my arm back out. So that's how we'll get in, we can pass through the field if we're with someone from Management."

Redcap snorted. "No one's ever going to goddamn take us through."

"Well, no," Overload agreed. "Not while they're conscious."

\------------

After some debate, they settled on Brownout, a shift manager with a predilection for getting sexual favors from his staff. Overload thought he was slime, so the thought of electrocuting him into stasis didn't trouble his conscience any.

He was explaining his plan to Redcap, who was sitting on the berth attached to the opposite wall of his room, drawing the outline of the hallways on the table with grease. "So, all you have to do is get him to the juncture, this one, right here, and I'll be waiting over here. Once he's, uh, 'distracted'--"

"Wait a second. _I_ have to seduce him? How do you figure that's going to work?" 

He looked up, "I don't see how not?"

"You mean other than the part where I have most fucking distinctive paint job on Cybertron," she said. "Everyone knows who I am. You have to do it."

"Me?"

"No, the rest of the Decepticon kill-team I have at my back and call." Redcap rolled her optics so hard Overload thought they were going to pop out of her helm. "Yes, you. The one who looks exactly like everyone else in the R-Series."

"Do you really have a kill-team?"

"No, just us. No one to betray us. No one to betray. A conspiracy of two."

"Well, fuck, because that would really have helped." He found himself agreeing with her, even as he wondered if it was true. Maybe it was supposed to be this way. If he didn't know any other Decepticons, there was no one for him to give up if they got caught. And getting caught in a restricted area wasn't exactly plesant to contemplate either, they'd be lucky if all they got was scrapped.

"Look, Overload," she leaned forward. "How badly do you need these other names? You said you knew already."

"I said I _thought_ I know. I want to be sure," he said. "I need to be sure."

"Alright partner," Redcap smirked. "Then you're gonna have to take one for the team here." 

"Primus, _shut up_."


	7. The Mask

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of everyone in the DJD, I think Vos' backstory is going to be the most non-canonical. I think the MTMTE guys said he used to be a scientist?
> 
> ...and holy shit. Imagine being these assholes and knowing that the DJD was out there and they all knew what you looked like.
> 
> You may also be asking, 'is Starscream supposed to be a good person in this AU?' and the answer is pretty much 'no'. But he /is/ a self-interested person, and slave armies tend to woefully under perform when compared to professional volunteer ones, and that puts /him/ in danger.

Skyflow raised the flute of energon to his lips as he watched Firebright pace around the immaculately appointed room like a caged bird. 

Their host had spared no expense. There were trays of crystallized and jellied energon set out on glass tables, decanters of rare high-grade, lovely servants who came and went on a regular schedule in case either guest needed anything. Music was playing from hidden speakers, giving the impression that it was coming from everywhere. It was one of Nightingale's operas, he thought, though he couldn't quite place it. One of her early works, if he had to guess.

Under his mentor's watchful gaze, Senator Firebright flopped down into one of waiting chairs, his engines grinding out an annoyed noise. He stayed that way for barely a minute, before standing again and stalking over to one of the windows. 

Skyflow couldn't help but to notice that each of the chairs and reclining benches had been carefully selected. Both guests were jets, and all the seating (save for a simple chair at the head of room) was designed with their wings in mind. Thoughtful, he noted. 

Firebright's heels clicked and he whirled around, baring his talons. "I hate Starscream! I utterly _loathe_ him. I want to tear the still-turning spark right out of--"

"Crass," said Skyflow. "There is etiquette to consider."

Vosians, after all, had rules regarding political assassination. Simply murdering a rival or an enemy was thought to be unsuitably poor form. Properly applied, an assassination would cause dozens of minor shifts in policy to ripple throughout the bureaucracy. Departments would be rearranged around the void left by the dead mech. Officers would be reassigned, subordinates promoted, and the subject of the Vosian's ire would end up stationed on a rock somewhere thousands of light-years from Cybertron.

Direct attempts on a superior's life showed a profound lack of respect, and regardless, Skyflow considered Firebright's ability to actually carry out the deed to be deeply in question. Starscream and the wretched pair of psychics he called trinemates were terrors.

"We aren't here," he said, changing the subject, "to discuss the Prince. We're here to celebrate a political alliance."

"I'm sorry, High Senator, he's just an infuriating, conniving, treacherous, by-blow of the All-Spark--"

He was cut off by the arrival of their host, Adamant, and Skyflow smiled as he watched his protege take in her appearance. Adamant was not attractive by most measures. She had once been a weather-controller - many, many solar sweeps ago, but now her body was covered helm to pede in elaborate etchings that started near the scar on the crease of her hip where her t-cog had been excised. A monoformer's mark. Her features were powerful and distinctive, but crude, and she stood a full five feet taller than either of the jets. Her wide frame easily outclassing either of them in mass. 

Wound around her waist and across one shoulder was a drape of elaborate, embroidered fabric. It was unusual for a Cybertronian. Clothing was widely considered unnecessary (a mech whose panels were closed was, for all purposes, decent), expensive, and fragile - and with little in the way of native animal life it had to be imported at great expense. It was a way of showing off how wealthy she was, and Adamant was indeed wealthy. Her time was so valuable that she only saw clients based on references from other clients.

"No need to stop on my account," she said, her voice was so harsh and grating it sounded like someone had poured acid down her vocalizer. 

"Adamant," Skyflow rose and crossed the room to her, taking her servos in his and leaning up so that he could kiss her on each cheek. "This is my close friend, Senator Firebright of Vos."

"I'm charmed," she smiled wryly and allowed Skyflow to guide her to the chair at the head of the room, "but you were discussing Prince Starscream? What's he done this time?"

Firebright rolled his optics. "What _hasn't_ he done?"

"I'm afraid I try to remain out of politics." Adamant crossed her legs at the knee, and Skyflow sat next to her, one servo resting over hers. His were elegant and thin, with talons each as long as the finger that supported them. Adamant's were heavy and thick. Clean, but pitted with scars and imperfections, the hands of a working mech. "You'll have to enlighten an old woman."

Firebright looked to him and Skyflow inclined his helm, just barely, to indicate that the younger mech could speak freely.

"You've heard of what the Ultra Magnus is trying to do?" Firebright scowled and rolled his optics, pacing again. "He's pushing the Senate to create a fully volunteer military. I can't--! It's absurd! The drones _choosing_ if they want to fight? And our companies are supposed to absorb the costs of retrofitting and reassigning them if the military won't take them?"

"And what," asked Adamant, "does Starscream have to do with this?"

"Last week, in the Senate, he backed the Ultra Magnus' motion," Skyflow said, magnitudes calmer than this younger partner. "It was quite the shock, since they're usually at each others throats."

"I thought Starscream was a military mech himself?" She looked between them.

"He is! But now he's claiming that conscripted drones are 'unreliable', and that Cybertron's planetary defenses are poorly served by owned mechs." Firebright tapped one pede on the floor, irritated. "Even worse than that, people are starting to take them seriously. We're putting together an opposition, to stop them from completely destroying our profit margins. Surely you understand the severity here, you build drones."

Adamant's fields swirled and she glared at the younger mech, as though aghast and offended. "I do not 'make drones', Senator. I am a sculptor, and I create _experiences_. The sort you've come here to procure, as I understand it."

Skyflow patted her hand, his fields calm and defusing, even as his optics flashed at the younger jet in chastisement. "Adamant, darling, please forgive my good friend. We've all had a difficult week, and I will personally vouch for this immense respect towards your work. He saw the wonderful little rifles you built for me and I'd like to get him one of his own as a token of our friendship and political alliance. Sparing no expense."

"Ah," Adamant's smile returned. A consummate businesswoman, Skyflow could respect that. "Yes, a rifle. That can certainly be done. We have some excellent sparks this year. My rifles are classified as minibots by weight, but not by height."

Firebright's expression didn't change, but his wings twitched. "Yes, of course. Excellent sparks?"

"Yes, of course. We procure many thousands of sparks, which we examine for certain traits." She gestured with one hand. "Obedience, loyalty, dedication, intelligence, submissiveness. A keen desire to please an owner. A partner for all aspects of life. We find fewer than one percent to be usable, so we sell the... detritus back to the Vaults. Typically, I make fewer than ten companions each year."

"Then you must charge--"

"I find it," Adamant said, raising an eyeridge, "as crass to discuss shanix as Vosians find it to discuss assassination. What we should discuss are the particulars of your companion. It helps if you are as honest as possible. Trust me, young mech, I have seen it all."

Firebright looked to him again, and Skyflow gestured for him to continue.

"Well," he began, as Adamant conjured a holographic display from the arm of her simple chair and began writing on it, surprisingly elegant calligraphy flowing from under her blocky fingers. "Skyflow's drones can't speak to anyone but him."

"Ah, yes. Specialized language and communication circuits are certainly possible, and popular, I might add."

"...and the companions have arrays?"

Adamant laughed, and it was a rough noise, like rocks tumbling and she made a note on her holopad. "Oh, yes, no need to be embarrassed. It's a common question. My creations have full interfacing arrays, though they can be made without them if that's what the buyer wants. They also come uploaded with a basic suite of sexual techniques, and of course there are upgrades."

"Upgrades?"

"The Thousandfold Courtesan Calculations, as an example."

"I'm guessing those cost--"

Skyflow cut him off before he could annoy their host again. "Adamant, love, it's safe to say that what we're looking for is everything you have to offer. The dear Senator made some enemies this week, and Firebright needs his companion for personal protection as well as for their tight little valve."

It seemed to mitigate her aggravation with the junior Senator, "then it will be no problem to draw up some schematics, and we can work together to pick out one you like."

"Excellent," Skyflow said. "Wonderful. I know they'll be a work of art."


	8. The Haywain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kaon has discovered punctuation. Also, probably the /only/ time he's ever going to try and be the voice of reason when violence is involved.

Brownout, like Melody, was a car. Overload knew next to nothing about grounder vehicles, but he knew that she was all sleek lines and fitted plating, while Brownout was bulky and heavy and awkward in his armor. Following some consideration, he made notes about him in The List.

brownout. car (unsatisfying, learn car types).  
ugly paint. taller than me, about two feet.  
third crew shift leader.  
gets sexual favors from his staff (dislike this strongly).  
on schedule rotation 4-c3a9.

After less than an hour, Brownout's name sitting in his neat file along with the names of the taken started bugging him like it was a sliver under his plating. They were better than he was, so he created a new (as yet unnamed) file, and moved Brownout there.

Brownout was a shift leader, which was sort of like what Redcap did, only with a whole shift of mechs instead of just a crew. The crew leaders reported to him, and in turn, he reported to someone higher up the chain. There were apparently a lot of levels of Management, more than Overload cared to count or remember. People like Brownout and Melody were at the bottom, tasked with the unenviable job of handling the mechs that _their_ bosses owned. He had always thought of each member of Management as a separate entity, but the ladders of power at Dependable were starting to take shape in his processor.

To Overload, it seemed that it must be shaped like main lightning channel in the Array. Which meant that at the hidden heart of this, there was a Titan.

The hardest part of shocking Brownout into stasis turned out to be their schedule. Redcap was right when she said that Overload looked identical to the rest of the R-Series. Shift changing was against policy, but as long as there was /someone/ working and they met their quotas, the crew leaders would look the other way. So it was no big deal to find someone to cover for him, especially since everyone on the bottom knew about his little 'investigation'. Redcap though, if she was missing, they'd know instantly.

All they could do was wait until the schedules lined up so Redcap and Brownout were off work at the same time. He watched the weeks tick by, mostly sleepless, his frame crawling with guilt and apprehension. 

\------------

"You're _sure_ you're going to be there?" He asked Redcap for what felt like the hundredth time. "I'm going to take him to the juncture between sector four and five."

She rolled her optics. "Funny how this plan was completely slagging foolproof when I was the one with the spike in my mouth."

"And you're sure that with my transfer, you have enough lightning to--"

"Unicron's fucking valve, yes!"

"It's just that--"

Redcap whirled around, her fields boiling. Anger curling through them, bright and red, the same color as her plating. To him, her energy looked like a scar on the world. "Overload, if you don't want to do it, fucking say so, but the window of opportunity we've got is pretty goddamn small."

Overload wasn't any stranger to interfacing. To be honest, there weren't a whole lot of other ways to pass the time. He'd slept with some of the other workers on Shift Four - all other mechs from the R-Series, his old roommate, and even Payroll a handful of times, but this was different. He found Brownout repulsive, and he longed to tell Redcap that no, he didn't want to do it. It was his plan though, his List, his theory, and he couldn't ask Redcap to do something he was unwilling to do himself. Especially considering the danger it would have put her in. 

"It's fine," he lied. "I just have no idea how to approach him without being as awkward and weird as fuck."

"Don't worry," she said, fields cooling down from an angry boil into a slow burn. "If you're uncomfortable and awkward, that's what he'll expect."

 _What he'll expect--_ Before he could get a question out of his vocalizer, Redcap punched him in the shoulder and vanished around the corner, heading deeper into the Array.

Overload went the other way, through a cramped side corridor to join the R-Series mechs who were being let off shift. It really was the perfect disguise, since nothing existed to distinguish him from the innumerable other workers crowding out towards the habs. The noisy press and static of overlapping energy fields irritated him, as it always did, but he thought about the mission to clear his processor and tried to stay calm.

Brownout stood to one side on a slightly raised platform, behind a railing. He was reading the day's productivity statistics from a holopad and watching the workers as they filed past.

 _Do it_ , he chided himself mentally. _If you're right, it can't possibly be as bad as what's happening to Payroll_.

With as little fuss as he could make, he made his way over to Brownout's platform, and the shift leader must have done this many times, because he barely even looked up as Overload approached. Even that, combined with the predatory look shift leader's dull optics, made him hesitate.

Much later, after the Decepticon conquest of a planet called Earth, one of Shockwave's human experiments would teach him the term ' _bottom feeder_ ', and that would have been an apt way to describe Brownout. 

He was broad-shouldered and heavyset, with mottled brown plating. Overload didn't think he took care of his appearance, not like Melody did, so maybe that was his natural coloring. To calm himself down, he updated The List.

brownout. car (unsatisfying, learn car types).  
ugly paint (possibly natural). taller than me, about two feet.  
third crew shift leader.  
gets sexual favors from his staff (dislike this strongly).  
on schedule rotation 4-c3a9.

"I need a favor," he said, gripping the railing of the platform with one hand.

Brownout's optics flicked over him, and the bigger mech chuckled. "Bet you do. We can talk in my office."

His office? No. Wait. Redcap wouldn't be waiting near the offices. Slag. Overload's mind raced. "That's... isn't that against company policy?"

"You let me worry about that," Brownout gestured to one of his crew leaders, who stepped onto the platform as he stepped off. It was an R-Series mech, and Overload didn't know him by name, though other than a crew leader's badge, they looked identical. He gave Overload a sympathetic look as Brownout took him by the arm, but said nothing, his fields reigned in tightly.

\-- lightningBug [LB] sent middleMarches [MM] a message! --

LB: redcap.  
LB: redcap, help.  
MM: what's going on? :O  
MM: where are you?  
LB: brownout is taking me up to his office. you have to come up here.

The shift leader wielded him through a hallway and he quickened his steps to make sure the car didn't start dragging him. They rounded a corner to a door and Overload pushed his fields out as far as he could, feeling for a security grid or an identity scanner and coming up blank. It meant there was nothing important up here.

MM: which office? he doesn't _have_ his own office.  
MM: it must be one of the general use ones.  
LB: ones?! there's more than one?  
MM: yes! there are a whole bunch of them. we use them for transmitting the day's take to the head office.  
MM: fuck. slag.  
MM: primus' fucking goddamn bearings.  
MM: i thought you were bringing him to the juncture?  
LB: it's possible, just maybe, that i'm really bad at seduction.  
MM: D:  
MM: okay, fuck it. i know where the offices are, just try and figure out which one it is.

He looked around, and just barely caught a number engraved outside the door before he was pushed past it.

LB: i think the door said 5c or something.  
MM: i'm coming, hold on.

The office they ended up in was bigger than Overload's apartment. Instead of berths, there were desktop surfaces welded to the walls around the periphery of the room, except on the side where the door was. The floor and walls looked like they hadn't been painted since the Array was new, and they'd faded to a chipped, ugly grey. A few mismatched chairs on wheels were sitting askance in the space, as if they had been an afterthought.

It wasn't a particularly small room, but the press of Brownout's to-eager fields made it feel absolutely claustrophobic. 

_Keep it together_ , he though, repeating his old mantra. _You've done this plenty of times before, so it shouldn't matter_.

Brownout at least, wasn't nervous. He backed Overload up until his coils bumped against the wall and tapped the thin metal of his valve's panel.

"Open up," he ordered.

Overload didn't, though excuses were slow to process. "Don't you... want to know what the favor is?"

"Not really," said Brownout, tapping his panel again, but more insistent this time. "Might not feel so inclined to say yes unless I get what I want."

 _Urgh_. He felt slimy. Like the film that clung to surface of siphoned energon was covering him. He offlined his optics and opened his panel. Normally, a Cybertronian's interfacing panels opened naturally when they were aroused, though it was possible to keep them shut. He was fairly sure it was the first time he had ever opened it manually.

A second later there was the blunt, heavy pressure of a spike up against it. Overload didn't care to hazard a look, but from what it felt like, Brownout's spike was bigger than he was used to. And his valve, he was fairly certain, was completely dry. There hadn't yet been a point in his life he had been less turned on.

LB: cap?  
MM: i'm almost there.

He had to bite down on a cry as Brownout filled him with a clumsy stroke. The other mech wasn't so big that taking him would have normally been painful, but combined with the angle and his total lack of arousal, Overload felt he was going to be ripped apart. He tried to find something to grab, but the wall was to smooth to brace himself, and he couldn't keep his balance. Brownout didn't seem to care or notice, he was to fixated on working himself towards climax, and Overload felt the first hot splashes of pre-fluid. Silently, he willed himself not to press his legs shut.

And then a pair of slim red hands came from behind Brownout, one covered his mouth, the other clutched his audial in a deathgrip. Lightning arced out of both of them, dancing and silver. 

It carried right through Brownout's frame and into Overload's, but unlike the car, who immediately went rigid, it didn't affect him. R-Series drones weren't built for beauty or speed, but they were made to withstand the titanic stresses and electric rivers of the Array. To him, the lighting was a light touch dancing over his plating. Familiar, and not entirely unpleasant.

Brownout's optics rolled back in his head and Redcap dropped him. He crumpled to the floor, inanimate, a puppet with cut strings. Overload winced as his spike yanked free, and he snapped his panels shut as quickly as he could, hoping Redcap hadn't seen.

"Primus, Red, is he dead?" He felt unsure of himself, dazed.

Redcap didn't answer. She kicked the fallen shift leader in his midsection, then pulled her pede back and kicked him again. Overload heard something break inside him, like clinking glass. By the time her foot came back the fourth time, he was composed enough to grab her. He took her by both arms and pulled her backwards.

"Red! Red! Primus! Fuck!" Her fields washed over him and it felt like he was taking an acid bath. "Stop! You're gonna kill him!"

"Did he hurt you?" She asked, between great, gasping vents. 

_Yes_.

"No," he lied. "I'm fine." His valve ached fiercely, and he could feel something trickling inside it, trapped with Brownout's fluids behind his panel. He hoped it would stop on its own, but it wasn't like he could see a doctor even if it didn't. Cautiously, he let go of her arms. "Help me pick him up. Do you know where we are?"

"Yes. Sort of. We're going to have to drag his stupid heavy aft almost twice as fucking far," she said, her venting cycling down towards normal levels as she leaned down and grabbed Brownout's arm. "Fucking cars. Help me."

"Right," he nodded to her and knelt on Brownout's other side, lifting and wincing. The shift leader was dead weight, his fields lax and quiescent. Overload had feared he was dead, but he'd seen dead mechs before, and Brownout wasn't grey. That was a good sign, or at least he thought so. 

Redcap checked the hallway, nodded to him, and they went. They kept to the back corridors and seldom-used hallways. More than once, they had to stop, conceal the unconscious mech, and wait for someone to pass. Each time he put Brownout down, Overload feared he wouldn't be able to pick him up again, but he was damned if he was going to stop now. He tried not to think about the pain in his valve or the clinging impression of Brownout's fields, and then there was--

LB: red, buddy, you were so pissed at him.  
MM: yeah, i guess so. maybe. i was worried about you.  
LB: no, i mean, like,  
LB: not about me, i feel like i should have picked up on it,  
LB: i guess the thing is,  
LB: do you want to talk about it?  
MM: no. and please fuck off.  
LB: alright.

It was an hour of dragging and hiding before they got to the juncture and another ten minutes before he felt the warning of the security screens outside the record's office hit his fields. The annoyed buzz was almost a relief.

Redcap glanced over at him. "Moment of truth."

"If it doesn't work," he said, taking a step forward and adjusting his grip on Brownout, "then I hope the field cuts me in half."

It did work, though. Just like it had with Melody. The field washed over them and left them intact. Overload didn't feel the prickle of an identity scan, and he wondered if it only picked up Brownout. Redcap dumped him as soon as they passed the field, and without her, Overload had no chance of carrying him alone. He let the shift leader tumble to the floor, and didn't spare him any sympathy.

The records office wasn't much nicer than the general use one, and it was smaller. Overload had to guess it was because there wasn't much in it other than tower shelves with slots for datapads. It was empty, or at least he thought so - but he didn't discount the idea that someone might be in here, working in their alt-mode. It was how he and Redcap worked.

"What are we looking for?" She asked.

"Some kind of record about who was taken," he said. "Start looking for entries on that date, and I'll start looking for lists of names. Hurry."

Redcap nodded, turning to one of the towers and checking the datapads, one at a time. Overload went to the one next to her, pulling them out and reading the labels. His work on The List must have helped - or maybe that it gave him something to think about other than Brownout, because he was working twice as fast as she was. He was finished with his shelf and onto the next one before she was halfway through hers. 

He found the dataslate on the third shelf, and pulled it down with shaking servos. "Here," he told Redcap, plugging the dataslug into it and watching The List populate. Fear and elation somehow combining into one emotion as he realized he was right. 

"All those sparks," he whispered.

"We've got to go," Redcap said, and she grabbed for his arm. "You can tell me once we're back in your room."

"No, no, I have to tell you now. In case we get caught. Someone has to know." Overload slid the datapad back into place and followed her, but not before noticing an external light on it changed color. Probably to indicate that someone had used it. There was nothing for it except hoping that they would chalk it up to a malfunction and that they wouldn't be able to track the dataslug. As he leaned down to pick up Brownout, he said, "Imagine you were rich."

Redcap let out a barking laugh. "That's every fucking night, buddy."

"Okay, but let's say you owned a new power company, and you had this great idea for making more money." He used his elbow to slide the door shut behind them. "Are we dropping him on the other side of the field?"

"We're dropping him." Redcap let out an annoyed vent. "Keep going with your little fantasy about how I'm filthy fucking rich. Right now, I'm doing shots of enriched high grade off the afts of the Prime's concubines."

He rolled his optics. "...but if you want to run your company, what do you need, other than money?"

"I don't know, workers? But they got workers, right?"

"No!" Overload frowned, then reconsidered. "Wait, _yes_ , but it's all wrong. Why not buy a whole crew or a whole Shift? Mechs who already know each other and work together. With all the R-Series they took, they have enough mechs to put together one Shift, maybe two! It's not just that, punchclocks, random minibots, a bunch of delivery vans and trucks, but not enough for a fleet. It's like Consolidated Energy didn't care who they got, and they didn't. They didn't need workers."

"Then what did they want?"

Overload glanced over at her. "Sparks."

"To do what with!?" Her fields twisted in horror. "I mean, experiments on Ignited sparks are illegal, aren't they?"

"That part I haven't figured out. For that, I think I need to go to Iacon."


	9. The Gauntlet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick glimpse into the future. Started at the bottom and now we're here.

Years in the future, but not many...

\-- electricJustice [EJ] sent gloriousCacophony [GC], ripTorn [RT], fromAshes [FA], and soSayeth [SS] a file! --

EJ: Read and review.  
EJ: No excuses.  
EJ: Tarn and I will not tolerate a repeat of last time.  
EJ: [FL] and [RW] will get modified versions based on their level of clearance.

\------------

\-- glorious Cacophony [GC] opened your file! --

Overlord  
Making: Forged  
Element: Fire  
Star Sign, Celestial Station: The Gauntlet, Sol  
Alt-modes, known: Cybertronian Heavy Attack Jet, Cataclysm Tank, Cutter Shuttle  
Alt-modes, possible: Up to three others. Alien alt-modes potentially available (please review notes on Kylss, Maial IV, Aryale VIII and their attack vehicles in particular). No recording of any organic holoforms on record, verified by [ES] on [2.3.11185].  
Color: Blue, Grey, Purple. Image and video files attached. [ES] verified.  
Rank: Warriors Elite, Phase Sixer  
Voiceprint: Available, files attached. [ES] verified.  
Notable Incidents: 

● Raigal III, [1.7.58395] - Broadcast of sexual assault and execution of Autobot captives leads Autobot Commander Blazestorm (image files, voiceprint of Blazestorm [FS] available, [ES] verified) to break ceasefire to stage a rescue attempt. As a result, loss of forward bases is catastrophic, and Decepticon forces are routed from Raigal system. Numerous previous incidents exist, [GC] considers this to be the inciting one. As a result, previous incidents are attached as a separate file and are not present on The List.  
● Decepticon Ship, Chimera - Murder of Decepticon Commander, Ricochet, in a dispute. Exact date in question. Ricochet's second claims [1.8.35053], but [ES] can't verify. Autopsy files available, [FL] verified.  
● Maial IV, Second Moon (Amaral), [1.8.99607] - Murder of Seeker Trine Halo, Photon, and Blacktalon, destabilizes Decepticon operations and allows a group of Maial organics to sabotage a primary Citadel and steal a Primal artifact being held there. Artifact not yet recovered and current location unknown.  
● Neutral Colony, Lightbeacon, Aryale VIII, [1.9.39022] \- Destruction of colony, sexual assault, and murder of neutrals leads the Black God's Guard to break ties with Megatron and withdraw their support from the Decepticon Cause. Voiceprint and video recording of High Priestess Soundshatter [SB] available, [ES] verified.  
● Kylss, [1.9.47851] \- Assault on Kylss not in compliance with Phase Six protocol. High General Axalon attempts to intervene, resulting in Overlord's murder of Axalon's amica endura. War between Decepticon factions galvanizes and unities the previously fracticious Kylss organics, resulting in the successful repulsion of the Decepticon invasion force.  
● Decepticon Capital Ship, Harbinger, [2.0.74930] \- Altercation with High General Meltdown over rights to Autobot captives. As a result of the chaos, Autobots manage to escape and attempt to scuttle the Harbinger, succeeding in setting it ablaze and crippling it. Of thirty, twenty-seven captives escape.  
● Decepticon Capital Ship, Nemesis, [2.1.59302] \- Attack on Megatron's primary bodyguard cadre. Repelled. Barricade critically injured (medical files attached, [FL] verified), but stable.  
● Decepticon Capital Ship, Nemesis, [2.1.59302] \- Attempted assault of [FL] and Autobot captive [CC] when they attempted to provide medical attention.  
● Decepticon Capital Ship, Nemesis, [2.1.59302] \- Murder of numerous Decepticon officers and soldiers during flight from the Nemesis. See attached files for autopsy notes, [FL] verified.  
● Decepticon Capital Ship, Peaceful Tyranny, [2.1.59304] \- Overlord's priority on The List adjusted following conference with [GC], [TA], [ES].  
● [2.1.59304 - 2.1.59582] \- See attached files for search logs. [EJ] verified.  
● Yane VI, [2.1.61294] \- Overlord successfully tracked to organic planet Yane VI by [EJ]. Murder of DJD members Helex (I) and Tesarus (II) who attempted to engage without backup.  
● Autobot Prison Planet, Garrus-9 \- Murder, possible sexual assault of Decepticon Commander Skyquake. Skyquake's spark-twin survives, contacts [ES] following incident. No timestamp available. Dreadwing reports [2.1.89584] but confirmation impossible.  
● Decepticon Capital Ship, Peaceful Tyranny, [2.3.11285] \- Overlord's energy signature tracked to Garrus-9. [EJ] verified.

\------------

\-- gloriousCacophony [GC] sent electricJustic [EJ] a message! --

GC: What do you suppose he's doing down there?  
EJ: If I had to hazard a guess?  
EJ: Anything he damn well wants.


	10. The Rising Smoke

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...and we're back with our doctor friends and a new character, in a scene that's similar to, but legally distinct from canon.

Whenever he could, Ratchet preferred to stay at his clinic. He had personal apartments at the Academy, but to his taste, those were far to close the Palace of the Primes. 

His clinic was smaller, easier to manage, and (once he and Wheeljack had finished remodeling it) cozier. Most importantly, it gave the illusion of safety. In the back of his processor, he understood the clinic wasn't a secret. Sentinel knew, and the Prime could reach him anywhere, but it was nice to pretend. 

Knock Out wasn't the first student who had put in time at the Dead End clinic, though he might have been the first one to do it under duress. Ratchet had been concerned about the racer's demeanor at first, worried that Knock Out would balk at the kind of patients who came through the clinic doors. He operated on a strict 'no judgement' policy, never turning a mech away, no matter why they had come through the doors.

Knock Out though, he had a way with people. He seemed to be perpetually charming and at ease, and he got on fine with the patients. The first night he had shown up empty-handed, but the next one and every night afterwards, he had brought energon or candies (or both) for the nurses. Ratchet wondered where he was getting it all, but the most likely answer was 'from his sponsors'. He knew Knock Out had an apartment in the wealthiest public district of Iacon, and at Ratchet's best guess he was living off a constant stream of gifts and handouts, never touching the stipend he got from the Academy. 

It was a generous stipend too, considering that the Academy based it on academic performance, and Knock Out was shaping up to be the most brilliant doctor of his time. More than once, Ratchet had tried to get Knock Out to sit down with the lawyers and accountants who worked at the Academy to sort out his post-graduation plans, because the apartment and all those gifts from his sponsors weren't _free_. Knock Out had blown it off, claiming he had things well in servo and Ratchet hoped he was right.

Yesterday the racer brought a pair of cases of flavored energon and a book of tickets to lobbing matches that he'd handed out to the other staff. According to Knock Out, lobbing (unlike _racing_ , which was the sport of kings) 'wasn't even a real sport'. Ratchet was half glad that Wheeljack (who enthusiastically maintained that _lobbing_ was the sport of kings) hadn't been around to hear it and half disappointed that there was no opportunity to sit back and watch them rile each other up.

While he waited for his student, Ratchet sat in his office and opened his unwieldy queue of messages with a heavy ex-vent. It had to be done, he supposed, and sooner was better than later. Perceptor had called him twice, the first time about some trouble with a student he'd caught cheating, and the second a barrage of high concept profanity about the Academy's Ethics Committee. Next was Wheeljack, assuring him that if the generator at the clinic hadn't blown up yet, it was definietly probably fixed. He was going to have to find some time to spend with both of them, away from other distractions. Maybe after the end of the school year.

Rainwing had sent him a request for an extension, claiming that he had lost one of his educational assistants, and Ratchet denied it out of hand. After a stewing through a few more meaningless messages in annoyance, he sent a reply to the jet scheduling a face-to-face meeting and warning him that he had better have found his assistant and that Ratchet expected the drone to be with him when he arrived. Scowling, the navigated over to campus security, who could at least confirm that Rainwing had filed a report about his lost drone. 

He was lost in his work for another hour or so, checking patient readouts and making rounds between answering long-ignored messages. Sunspark, the Dean of Medical Admissions, wanted Ratchet to go out with him and his cojunx. Neon wanted him to approve a project she was working on, but insisted he come by in person to view it. A patient who had come in near-empty was on supplements and seemed to be doing well, and Ratchet cautioned him that if he could stand it, he shouldn't go above thirty-percent energy levels for a while. Comet, the Academy's foremost expert on processor work, wanted to know if Ratchet could cover one of his classes. Pharma--

"Ratchet?" The door to the primary patient bay hissed open and Prowl stuck his helm in. "Got an emergency here." The Enforcer was, as usual, a difficult read. His fields drawn in and professional and his expression neutral, bordering on cross.

He sensed Orion before he saw him, the mech's powerful fields sweeping past Prowl like a landslide to fill the medbay. Unlike Prowl, Orion was an easy read, even with his expression hidden behind a closed battlemask. It was something that later, Jazz would be constantly on him about. Right now he was concerned, with anger running just under the surface, like a fault line.

If things had been different, Ratchet might have taken a moment to stop and admire him. He wasn't a small mech himself, but even so, he only barely reached the center of Orion's chest. The truck was built for heavy loads and long hauls, broad-shouldered and strong, though he carried the weight well and with a certain amount of grace - despite having to duck around some of the lower ceilings in the retrofitted clinic. His hands were pitted and scarred from hard work - the hallmark of those in low-castes, and his frame was to heavy for door-wings.

Orion was carrying a mech that had probably once been white, but there was so much grime, filth, and dust covering the unconscious bot that it was impossible to tell. He gestured Orion over, sweeping them both with a medical scan that at least confirmed the crumpled frame he was carrying wasn't dead. There was a faint spark pulse, desperate and tiny, like a speck caught in a whirlwind. "Primus," he whispered. "Quickly. Put him down here. What happened?"

"He was being assaulted," Orion lowered the mech onto the table, and Ratchet made a noise of annoyance when he saw the ruined medical port on his arm. It wasn't unusual for addicts to inject through the medical port, especially if they didn't have functioning oral intakes or when they inevitably collapsed their other ones. It just complicated things. "By slavers, or prolongers, I believe."

"Orion called us to help, and Tumbler took them down to the station," Prowl said, he had been standing silently, off to one side.

"Do not even get me started on the prolonger cult," Ratchet surveyed the damage, half in awe that the mech was still alive. "Orion, help me clean him off. Nothing I can do will be any help if he dies from an infection. Prowl, get me the medical-grade from the supply cabinet. He needs a transfer."

There were mechs who would have balked at the thought of touching a siphonist replete with filth or doing the grunt work of washing off a patient covered in the Dead End's leavings, but Orion wasn't one of them and Ratchet was grateful for that. The clinic had nurses, but it was strictly on a volunteer basis, and none of them were here at the moment. Of course, there was always...

\-- medicAlert [MA] sent finishLine [FL] a message! --

MA: Are you in class?  
FL: No, Ratchet. I got sick of paying my debt to society and I'm in prison again.  
FL: Of course I'm in class.

He pulled up Knock Out's schedule rotation and checked it, the solvents and water oily and black as they sluiced off the unconscious mech and into the drain at the bottom of the medical slab.

MA: I need you down at the clinic. Tell Professor Dawnspeaker you have my permission.  
FL: What, really? Now?  
MA: Yes, Knock Out, really. Now.  
MA: ...and don't text in class. It's rude to your professor.

\-- medicAlert [MA] closed the chat! --

The mech _was_ white, as it turned out, and he convulsed on the table as Ratchet fished a line out of his arm, and cut it to attach a temporary feeding port so Prowl could string up the medical grade and start a drip. He would need all his ports replaced, and even without an in-depth medical scan, Ratchet guessed the mech's oral intake was shot too. He settled for categorizing it as ' _damage to every major system_ ', disabled his primary comm, and started a log.

Orion stood at the edge of the slab, trying not to hover and failing spectacularly. He was to big. "How else can we help?"

"You can stand the hell back and stay out of my way," Ratchet was already working, patching leaks and rewiring connections. He would have been the first to admit that he could be brusque, but he was glad that Orion didn't seem to take any offense. And with Orion what you saw was what you got. It wasn't safe to trigger stasis, and administering more drugs would have been a death sentence, but he contented himself with the knowledge that there was no way the mech could feel anything. An hour of work lifted the siphonist's readings from black to red, and Ratchet drained the remaining drugs out of his system slowly, setting up a new drip of energon.

Two hours in, Prowl said Tumbler had commed him and he had to get back to work, nodded to them curtly, and left without any further comment.

Knock Out showed up at the two-hour and sixteen minute mark, carrying Click on one arm. When he saw Ratchet entrenched in surgery, he carried her back out, and Ratchet heard him setting her on the counter outside and telling her to do that important job of manning the front desk.

"Sorry," he said, stepping in and skirting around Orion to the edge of the medical slab - though not before raking his eyes up and down the taller mech in a manner that Ratchet wouldn't have hesitated to describe as 'thirstily'. "You know how it is. I came quickly as I could, but there was traffic and I had to drive the speed limit."

"Good," said Ratchet and Orion, at virtually the same time.

Knock Out rolled his optics. "Am I even allowed to assist in surgery? I mean, legally?"

"You've come far enough that I can overlook it this one time while you act as secondary."

"Ah! So I take it that this means my prospects for graduation are good--"

"Knock Out, _shut up_ and hand me that microtuner."


	11. The Treasure Trove

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In BaS, Cybertronians have very long, but limited lifespans, and Ratchet /knows/ something.

If not for the comatose mech hovering on the edge of death, Ratchet might have considered it a perfect day.

Knock Out was sitting at the front desk, organizing the clinic's inventory count and monitoring patient readouts. Click sat facing him, her little legs kicking idly over the edge of the desk while she organized his lecture notes on her little holopad. Doing inventory was something they didn't teach at the Academy, it was considered grunt work, and much to Ratchet's dismay, it was normally relegated to drones. Ratchet had made it part of his program about ten solar sweeps into his tenure. As far as he was concerned, it was a life skill, and Primus willing - someday there wouldn't _be_ slaves to assign grunt work too. 

That and he swore if he had to deal with another physician who couldn't read an inventory list, or place an emergency order, or locate parts in a storage bay (or worse, one who thought doing that sort of thing was beneath them), he was going to slap them.

Orion and Wheeljack were installing a new power regulator. The old generator hadn't exploded in the end, but it had finally ground down to a halt and died two days ago. Ratchet, old and set in his ways, would have bought a new one, but Wheeljack had talked him around to electricity - which was supposedly cheaper and more reliable than late model energon generators. He was trying to explain where they got it from, which was an 'Array' that combined the spark emanations of the Patropolii and Matropolii with solar and lunar lightning, but halfway through the explanation Ratchet had waved him off and just told him to install the damn thing and get the power working properly.

They were talking now, about who was going to be lobbing champion. Half, Ratchet thought, because they were interested, and half because Wheeljack knew it would get under Knock Out's plating. From where Ratchet was sitting, he could see the racer rolling his optics every time their conversation (which currently seemed to be about the championship chances of a mech named 'Heatwave') carried out of the main bay.

...but it was a good day. He was in his clinic, working, and in the company of friends. 

Ratchet didn't know it at the moment, but it would be the last good day for a very long time.

"You know," Knock Out said, as he clicked idly through screens, "I'm curious about how you pay for all of this. New medical ports aren't exactly free, and then there's the rebuild you did on his arm intakes. Replacement plating, protoflesh grafts--" He trailed off. "Teaching jobs can't pay _that_ well, and this is _one_ patient we're talking about. That's not even getting in to the surgeries you did last cycle. You could have funded a cruise around the system or a suite apartment in the Meru district if you were doing them on people who could pay."

 _Here we go_. Ratchet shook his head and vented. "I don't do what I do to be wealthy, Knockout. But if you must know, I have sponsors too."

"Come again?" His student raised an eyebrow. "There are wealthy patrons tripping over themselves to fund this place?"

"Hardly!" He snorted and set down his cube of energon. "But I do have friends. Perceptor, Sunspark, Comet. Most of the professors in the medical department, actually. Wheeljack helps out. Orion, Prowl, and Tumbler make sure no one robs the place. The nurses. Students interested in servos-on work."

"...but they can't be paying the entire cost of your overhead, and the building itself is new. Or at least, newer than the rest of the Dead End."

"Ah," Ratchet smiled. "That would be an... out-of-town investor. You may have heard of him, actually. Pharma, the head of the Vosian Medical Elect."

"You're kidding," Knock Out said, his accent dripping with sarcasam. "What, are you sleeping with him?"

"Yes," said Ratchet, smirking, but willing himself not to laugh at the shocked expression on Knock Out's face. "I mean, I do what I have to, for my patients."

"--but you, you're so _old_. You were born, I mean--" Knock Out's mouth twisted, and his optics shot up and down Ratchet's frame. "How old are you?"

Ratchet vented heavily, deciding there was no option but to be truthful, "I was born in the morning on the day before the Night of One Billion Sparks, and Pharma was born the first night after. There was quite a fuss. Over Pharma's Ignition, I mean. We thought Malleus had damaged the All-Spark to the point that no more outliers or exceptional Sparks could emerge."

"Then that would make you--"

 _There it is_. Ratchet watched his student work through it, amused.

"--even older than I thought. How?"

"Malleus Prime extended my lifespan. I was his personal physician, and we were close. It's not a secret, Knock Out. We can talk about him."

"Is that possible?" Knock Out had seemingly completely lost interest in both inventory files and accounting. "By how much?"

"Yes, and he didn't say," Ratchet shrugged. "I don't think about it, I just try to make the most of what I was given. Earth-aligned mechs have naturally longer lifespans, just as Fire-aligned mechs have shorter ones, but I've lived a little more than twice what could be considered natural. And by all accounts, I appear to be in excellent health."

"...were you there when he made the drones?" Click looked up at him now, her legs had stopped swinging off the edge of the desk.

"No," Ratchet lied, fighting down a current of guilt, never letting it reach his fields. "He did that on his own."

"Still, you must know where their sparks came from?"

"Whatever he did, he didn't share it with me," and that lie, long practiced, was easy.

\------------

Killswitch came online to a room full of people and to-bright artificial lights. There were voices, and the buzz of personal energy fields, and restraints holing him against a sloped table - he couldn't comprehend where he was or how he'd come to be here, only that he couldn't move.

His spark chamber was open, bared to anyone who cared to look or touch, and he had no idea that such an act was meant to be sacred and private and intimate. Firebright would take his spark whenever the mood struck him, and later, Helex would help him weld the lock on his chestplates shut, but he didn't understand these things yet. Even after his processor activated following a ten-second delay.

He had energy levels. They read at one-hundred percent. He had a creator, Adamant; an owner, Firebright; a planet, Cybertron; a god, Primus. A purpose, to serve Firebright and please him. From his pre-programmed memory files, he called up a picture of his owner and looked at it.

Firebright was beautiful, or at least Killswitch thought so, brilliant and slim and red-orange in color. He was from Vos, a place that Killswitch could only visualize in the abstract, as though it were mythical. Maybe Firebright would not keep him in this room. Maybe he would take him away to live there. Firebright would be a good person, and hold him and take care of him - because his programming helpfully supplied that Killswitch could not take care of himself.

"Hello," said one of the mechs in the room, having noticed he was awake and peering down at him. "Can you tell me your name?"

 _No_. No he couldn't. This unidentifiable mech wasn't his owner, and he wasn't to speak to anyone but his owner. Still, the mech hovering over him wasn't owned, and pre-loaded etiquette files started to take shape and form connections. He was owned. It was intolerable to ignore a free mech, even if he couldn't answer. Tilting his chin up, he shook his head.

The mech made a note on a holopad. "Good," he purred, engines idling. "Your coding is shaping up very nicely. Next time, don't make optical contact."

Inside his processor, his suite of etiquette programs resorted themselves and updated.

"His precinct looks like the Mask," said another mech, and when Killswitch saw her looking at him, he looked down. She didn't seem to care, and she talked over him as though he weren't present. "...Earth-aligned, and Adamant will have to make the final call, but his Station looks to be Deep Space."

"Oh good," the first mech was back, and he scanned Killswitch with something that made his protoflesh prickle. "Very close to her predictions. You're going to make your owner very happy, aren't you?"

This time he didn't lift his head to nod.


	12. The Walker Among Irises

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Knock Out, you sweet summer sparkling. You really think Kaon can't dig this stuff up if he wants to?
> 
> Like, do you remember when you gave out someone's personal comm to the Prime?

"What's... wrong with his spark chamber?" Firebright asked, and Killswitch felt his fields wither under the weight of his master's disappointment. 

"Nothing's wrong with it," Adamant said, drumming her thick fingers on the arm of her chair in annoyance. Killswitch didn't know her well, but every interaction with his master seemed to annoy her. He wished she would be more polite to him, but he was powerless to tell her that. His vocalizer was locked, and it wouldn't respond to anyone but Firebright. 

"What you're looking at," she explained, "is called an iris extension. Those petal-prongs will allow him to get much more out of an inferior spark and optimize his energon expenditures. He can process instructions more accurately, move faster, learn quicker, and he'll be more responsive to you, especially during interfacing." 

Killswitch was standing now, they had taken him from the room he had onlined in to a different one. This room was much nicer, full of energon candies and draped fabric and sparkling high-grade. Not that he was permitted to eat, except from his owner's hand. His spark chamber had been closed for the walk here, but opened again once they had presented him to Firebright for inspection. He longed, desperately, for the jet's approval, but so far he'd only been distant.

"I'm quite proud of it," Adamant said, leaning back in her chair and lifting a tiny cube of high grade from the table positioned next to it. "A creation of my own processor."

"If it's so special," Firebright sneered. "Why not put them in all the drones?"

"--because they are difficult to make, expensive, and because I didn't become rich by giving away my secrets." She was becoming agitated with him again and Killswitch didn't like it. "Is your companion to your liking or not, Senator?"

Firebright hooked one claw under his chin and turned Killswitch's helm from side to side. "He seems pleasing enough, I suppose. Close this," the jet tapped the tip of his finger against one of the out metal prongs of his spark chamber. "It belongs to me, so you open it only _for_ me."

Killswitch hurried to obey, pressing his chestplates closed until the lock clicked and looking back to Firebright for approval, but the jet's attention had already returned to Adamant.

"His chamber has been opened before?"

"That's necessary," Adamant's tone was clipped, as though she was speaking to a mech in a much lower caste, and not to Killswitch's master, who was the most important mech in the world. He cringed. "To place the spark inside. I can assure you he's untouched and fully sealed. There would be little point in lying, since I assume you're going to take him as soon as you have some privacy."

??: I don't like her.  
FF: Master.  
FF: You are an owned mech.  
FF: When you address me, do not forget your place.  
??: I don't like her, Master.  
FF: Neither do I.  
FF: And come up with a proper commsign, you're making my chats look ugly.

Adamant rose, taking her cube with her. "At this point, it's safe to release him into your custody, and if that will be all, I'm sure you have places to be, Senator."

Killswitch frowned, glancing up at Firebright without making eye contact. Adamant was not showing his owner the proper respect, and it was on purpose, he was sure. It was distressing, because he couldn't correct her without Firebright's permission. All he could do was vent dislike into his fields as she left, her wide frame swaying.

"Of course," Firebright snapped his fingers at Killswitch and held his hand out. "Come here."

Killswitch jumped, transforming to rifle-mode in mid-air, intending to attach and then overwhelmed by the sensation of falling when Firebright jerked his hand back. He clattered unceremoniously to the ground, bouncing off his stock and landing haphazardly. It didn't damage him - he was to well-made for that, but the sharp arc of pain was a new sensation, and it bled through to his fields.

"What the hell are you doing?!" Firebright snapped, half-laughing and giving him a kick with one of his narrow, heeled pedes. The point caught him the barrel and spun him helplessly on the floor, while the pain made him shudder so hard his plating rattled. "Get up. I hope you don't expect to be carried."

He transformed back, intending to come up standing, but something pinched in his side and he ended up kneeling.

??: ...but, I'm a rifle.  
??: I don't weigh very much.  
??: I'm supposed to attach. I was made for--

Firebright slapped him so hard he tasted energon in his mouth. He had never tasted anything before and it was sharp, acidic. He didn't like it, and the blow bent bent him, so he braced himself on the floor with his servos. "Don't use the comm again without my permission. You speak when you're spoken to."

He wanted to comm his owner, to apologize for whatever he had done wrong, but he couldn't. Instead, he drew himself in and nodded.

\------------

The Palace of the Primes was a city within a city, more an entire location then it was a single building. It stood at the northernmost tip of Iacon, bordering the Well of All Sparks, and the northernmost area of the Palace held the House of Sparks Ascendant. The House was the home of the twin Suns, Sentinel and Zeta, though Zeta rarely returned to Cybertron. Before them, Malleus had laid claim to it, and eight millennia before him, Arialus. Before her, Tectonicus. Before him, Terra Firma and the alien AI she had taken as a lover (and the sparkless, monster-thing was still imprisoned somewhere below the Palace, or so the stories claimed). Before them, Clockwerk, Invictus, Sapphire, Libra - an unbroken line, going all the way back to the Thirteen and the Age of Wonders.

The Chambers of the Greater and Lesser Council were here as well. The private residences of Senators and Nobles. The Palace even had its own rivers, sprawling organic and crystal gardens, galleries and museums. Firebright was from Vos, and he had apartments there, but he lived in the Palace when the Greater Council was in session. It was hard for Killswitch to take in, so much beauty and power contained in one place. He longed to press his face to the window of the transport and watch it flash by, but Firebright had ordered him to sit quietly. Instead, he contented himself with seeing what he could when the transport glided down an incline.

He wasn't Firebright's only owned mech, not by a long shot. The Senator had dozens of drones, though they made themselves scarce as their master passed and Killswitch followed at his heels, trying to keep up.

Senate apartments were very nice, much nicer than the room he had onlined in and the one that Adamant had brought him to in order to present him. Dormant parts of his processor came online, telling him the names of art pieces imported from Vos and providing descriptions of custom furnishings - so he could discuss it with his master, if that was what the jet wanted. There were a lot of useless things he knew, he realized, like how to do energon pairings and the names of historical operas.

He wanted to ask which room would be his, but Firebright hadn't spoken to him since they had gotten on the transport. He hoped, quietly, that he would be allowed to stay in Firebright's room. Protecting his owner and his alliance with High Senator Skyflow was why he had been made, after all. There would be no way to guard him properly if he couldn't stay near him.

It didn't seem to be an issue, because Firebright led him into his berthroom. Killswitch was yet to enter a recharge cycle, but the massive berth that dominated the center of the room looked comfortable, at least. One wall had glass doors that led to a balcony, and another supported a massive holoscreen that was taller than Killswitch was. Firebright gestured to it, and it switched off with a click.

"Get on the berth," Firebright said, and scowled at him immediately when he rested his aft on the very edge. Killswitch hadn't intended to presume that his owner would let him recharge there, he would have been fine with the floor and he didn't want to make the Senator angry again. "All the way on. Kneel down."

Oh. He leaned forward, resting on his forearms and knees. Programs queued up and starting running themselves in his processor, how to position his legs and spread them properly, how to brace himself against the berth. He could feel a trickle of something slick inside his valve, and while he wanted to please Firebright, he certainly wasn't aroused. 

The jet tapped his valve's panel with one talon. "Open, and let's see if you're as good as Adamant says you are."

Killswitch wasn't sure if that was a comment that invited answer and he didn't want to risk it. Instead, he opened his panel, and the air in the room was cool over his exposed components. Firebright's talons pricked over the delicate protoflesh, and he thumbed over the semi-transparent seals the enclosed the folds of Killswitch's valve. The ministrations were making him even slicker, though it was all trapped behind the seal.

"Yes," Firebright purred, and the jet's thumb moved to stroke a circle around his anterior node. The touch made Killswitch whine, and his thighs shook. Maybe Firebright was going to be kind after all, and maybe it had been his own fault for making his owner angry. His pre-loaded programs didn't address it, but maybe he shouldn't have expected to have been allowed to attach. He resolved that he would do better in the future.

"Very nice." The jet's servo was still working between his legs, and Killswitch felt his weight shift as the other mech moved behind him on the berth. Firebright was running hot, and he vented heat out over Killswitch's smaller frame. A finger pressed deeply into his seals, stretching them to the point of causing pain, and he whined again, unable to help it. "You want my spike, don't you?"

That demanded an answer, and there was no denying his owner. Killswitch nodded, and pushed a word out of his vocalizer, the first one he ever had. "Yeeeeesss."

Firebright laughed sharply and gripped his helm, turning his head so he was forced to look back. Killswitch wasn't ready for it, and it jerked him, his throat cabling straining. "I can't believe you cost so much. Your voice sounds idiotic."

Later, Tarn would explain to him that that wasn't the case. Most mechs who had only just come online had strangely pitched voices, and they learned to modulate through extensive socialization. Some high-ranking mechs even had coaches, to help them cultivate their accents (before the war, of course). Some, like Soundwave, never bothered to - and Tarn thought _very_ highly of the communications officer.

But the damage was done, and shame stung through his fields like a crackle of green lightning. When Firebright let him go, he lowered his helm so his forehead touched the sheets. He had one purpose, and that was to please his owner, and he'd failed at it. Silently, he resolved to stay on the comm from now on.

Firebright was still behind him, and Killswitch heard the click of a panel opening, his processor helpfully filling in the blanks. His owner's spike felt warm as it slid between his legs and up over his aft. It was big, but only considering their size differences. It would easily fit, since his valve had been made with nothing in mind beyond Firebright's sole enjoyment of it.

The tip of his owner's spike was pointed, and it pressed against Killswitch's seals as his finger had, hard enough to cause pain. He barely felt it this time, the sting of embarrassment was still running hotly through him.

It hurt when Firebright gripped his hips and angled himself to fill him in one stroke. Programs onlined, and he found he could follow their instructions without thinking about them - without thinking about anything, really. So, while he didn't like what Firebright was doing, but he didn't pull away. Instead he raised his hips a bit higher and pushed against his owner's thrusts, trying to relax as his calipers clicked and squeezed around Firebright's length.

The pain of having his seals broken was temporary, it seemed, and pressure started to build inside him that blotted it out. He found that after a few moments, he didn't need instructions to keep up a rhythm with Firebright, moving with him and pushing back as he pushed forward. The pressure built until it carried out across his frame, and an overload had him thrashing under his master. Somewhere in the middle of it, he felt his calipers cycle down, gripping Firebright to try and hold him inside. 

It must have felt good to Firebright too, because a few more thrusts and Killswitch could feel the spike inside him swell until his owner's overload filled him, the silver-grey transfluid hot and thick. Firebright held him, gripping his hips and keeping himself hilted inside until he finished, then releasing Killswitch so he could sink down onto the berth.

He felt good, pleased that there was finally something that made his owner happy. Even the transfluid dripping down his thighs was welcome. Maybe Firebright would let him recharge here, curled up with him. That would be the most wonderful thing in the world.

It didn't last. Firebright tapped him with a talon. "Close," he ordered.

Killswitch triggered his panel shut, sitting up a little, to face Firebright. The jet gestured with one servo. "Transform."

He didn't understand, but his owner couldn't be denied, and he folded himself down into his rifle-mode. Firebright picked him up and Killswitch thrilled at being held and carried. They had gotten off to a rocky start, but everything would be alright now! He had probably just been annoyed at how rudely he'd been treated by Adamant - who didn't understand how important and special he was, but she was gone now, and Killswitch would keep him happy.

It got even better when Firebright found a cleaning cloth and wiped him off, making sure there was no transfluid clinging to his outer components. It felt good to be cared for, and soon every day would be like this. If he'd had engines, they would have purred.

When his owner was finished, he carried him into another room and set him down on something. 

It was a stand, Killswitch realized. He dug through his programs until he found his sensors, and swept the area with a scan. A stand inside a cabinet.

"You stay here when I'm not using you. Don't move without my permission."

 _Wait, but_ \--

??: I'm supposed to protect you!  
??: I can't do that from here!

"And don't use the comm either." Firebright slid the cabinet door shut, closing him up in the dark.

\------------

"I have to go, Ratchet," Knock Out said as he gathered his things and subspaced them, one at a time. Click raised her arms to him and he scooped her up, sitting her on his arm. "We're not going to make it if I don't leave now."

"Yes, right. The gallery show, with your Decepticon friend." Ratchet rolled his optics, but nodded. "Go on then."

Knock Out's engines made a grinding noise, like he was trying to shift gears without the clutch. His voice was haughty and annoyed. "Sunbeam is _not_ a Decepticon. She's a Decepticon _sympathizer_. It's totally different. She's part of an important anti-slavery movement and she's an _artist_. Not to mention that she hasn't even graduated yet and she's already famous. She's going to be a star."

"She's going to be arrested is what she's going to be," Ratchet muttered, mostly to himself. "And I suppose you're going to be her personal physician?"

"You can't be arrested over art," Knock Out said, his voice airy and yet somehow still full of challenge. "And there's nothing wrong with wanting to be sought after by the rich and famous. You really should try it some time."

"Listen to me, Knock Out, you need to pick your friends better, because the Prime can do whatever he damn well--"

"Are you two talking about Sunbeam?" a heavier voice cut through the argument as Orion stepped out of the main bay, followed by Wheeljack.

"Primus," Ratchet rubbed the side of his helm. "Not you too."

"No worries, Ratch," Wheeljack said, grinning. "You've still got one crass, uncultured friend. I'll save ya."

"I saw some of her work," Orion said, "and I approve of her message, if not her anger. That is all."

"Well," Knock Out raised an eyeridge. "Color me suprised. I didn't know you did gallery tours."

Wheeljack burst out laughing, and even Ratchet couldn't suppress a smile. Orion just vented and shook his helm, though his lipplates did curve up by a bare fraction.

"What?!" Knock Out looked between them. "What is it?"

"Kid," Wheeljack paused, rebooted his vocalizer, and went on. "Orion and I are, how to put this, see, our energon ain't exactly _blue_ enough to get into a fancy fuckin' gallery showin'. The lobb matches are about where we get off the train."

Ratchet was glad that Knock Out at least had enough self-awareness not to ask what caste they were in, though the older medic already knew. Wheeljack had been born during the Night of One Billion Sparks, and he was ex-military. Like so many others, there had been no choice. He had been relegated there by Malleus' insane ambitions to conquer the universe. Along with hundreds of thousands of others, he had been all but emancipated by Tyrest and the Ultra Magnus when Sentinel had seized the throne. Ratchet approved, even though the real purpose had been to fill the military with pre-fabbed drones built by Sentinel's supporters in the Senate. Wheeljack was a handful of castes above the much younger Orion, who was a civil servant born into the Age of Two Suns - one rung above slavery by the mere merit of being Forged.

"Well, then, you could call her. Ask her out." Knock Out smirked. "Her commsign is prismPower, but she sometimes uses towardsWar."

Orion's expression was thoughtful. "Something tells me the author would not approve, and perhaps I will. Thank you."

Knockout looked delighted, his grin nearly splitting his face. "Oh, excellent, perfect. But I do have to go." He turned on his heel, surgical claws catching the light as he waved and breezed out the door.

\-- medicAlert [MA] sent valorousGrace [VG] a message! --

MA: He's teasing you.  
VG: I am well aware.  
MA: Don't get involved.  
VG: I have no intention of doing anything inappropriate.  
MA: Sentinel has his optic on her, for the concubinage.  
MA: There were priests, they came to Academy, to interview her.  
VG: Then I find that her anger is much more understandable.

\-- valorousGrace [VG] added prismPower [PP], towardsWar [TW] to contacts! --


	13. The Musician

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little bit of everyone this chapter, and hey, it's Kaon, who the story is actually supposed to be about!

\-- prismPower [PP] sent echoingSilence [ES] a message! --

PP: You wanted to know about the gallery exhibit~  
PP: You can view it in the Hightower district, tonight~ at~  
ES: Speak freely, commline is secure.  
PP: Then I'll be quick~ I don't know if I can stall for much longer~ He sent me a gift yesterday~  
PP: If I'm taken to the Palace~ I won't be able to pass information to you anymore~  
ES: ...  
PP: Soundwave~  
ES: Conferring.  
PP: I~ Okay~ I'll wait~  
ES: Megatron wishes for your acquiescence regarding Prime's request.  
ES: Will update you on how information can be transmitted across Palace defenses.  
PP: I don't~~

There was a long pause, the other end of the comm sitting open, patient. Finally, a line of text appeared on her HUD.

ES: Require clarification.  
PP: I~ no~ It's nothing~ I'll tell the priests the next time they come~  
ES: Unacceptable.  
PP: Unacceptable to you~ or to Megatron~  
ES: Both.  
ES: Agent within the Prime's Palace is useless if cooperation is forced.  
ES: Betrayal likely.  
PP: It's not that~  
PP: It's just that I'm scared~  
ES: Unnecessary.  
ES: When the time comes, we will retrieve you.

\------------

Overload felt like he and had Redcap talked through every possible permutation of their plan. She was practically living in his room - only returning to her own quarters for the occasional recharge, and he found he didn't mind having a roommate. Not when what they were doing was so important.

"You think they're using people up?" Redcap was laying on the opposide berth, one arm behind her helm as she read from a datapad. It was stolen, its uplink disabled after she can taken it from one of the offices, but still usable for what they needed.

"I know they are, and I think Payroll did too. That's why he sent me the message." Overload sat on his own berth, revising The List, though it was probably unnecessary now. "So I would look for him. I think they must be monitoring communications too, because the slug wasn't tampered with, and whatever filter they had wouldn't pick up a blank message."

"Do you think Roll's dead?"

Overload nodded. "Yeah, I..." He shook his helm. "It's not important. What's important is what we talked about."

She set the datapad aside and propped herself up on her elbows. "About how you're going to go to Iacon?"

"If they're using people up, sooner or later they're going to have to come back for more. It'll be easy to go, I'll just volunteer, and once I get there, I'll figure out what's going on and stop it."

"That's a tall fucking order for a single R-Series drone."

"Two R-Series drones," he said, "because when it happens, you're going to stay and make another List."

"Overload--"

"We can't be passive about this. We're just... just things to them! Objects to be used up. They don't care about our lives."

"I wasn't going to say you shouldn't go. I was going to say, if you're going, I have something for you." Redcap sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the berth. Overload heard a click, for a second, he thought she was going to open her panels, and he almost began to protest. If she did, he was an even worse judge of people then he thought, because he had never thought of their relationship that way. That, and he didn't want to think about interfacing since his encounter with Brownout. His valve had ached for weeks and until recently, every time he washed it, he found dried energon caked inside.

...but then she opened her chestplates and he _did_ protest.

It was worse in a way, than if she had come on to him. It was to intimate, to personal. He shielded his optics, but the blue glow that washed over the room filtered through his servos.

"Cap, what the actual fucking fuck are you doing?!"

He heard a scrape, like metal on metal, and the heavy click as she pushed them closed again. "Primus, Overload, you're freaking out."

Overload flailed, keeping his optics shuttered. "Me?! You're the one scandalizing my room like it's the set for some low budget holoporn!"

"Sweet Solus Prime, open your fucking optics."

He onlined them to the sight of an amused Redcap, holding something out between her fingers. It looked like a scrap of purple metal. "What's this?" he asked.

"It's my badge," Redcap said. "I can't promise it'll keep you safe, but it'll help you find other members of the Cause in Iacon, and maybe they can help you."

Overload took it, turning it over in his fingers. It looked like a stylized mask, with prongs on a finial that wasn't representative of any caste-marker. it was lighter than he thought it would be, and engraved on the back were the words 'your spark came from the well', with no punctuation. He wondered where Redcap gotten it. Who had given it to her? She said they were the only ones in the Array. Was it valuable?

"Don't put it in your subspace," she said. "Wear it behind your spark chamber. They never search there."

"Alright," Overload glanced up her, "but you need to turn around or something."

\------------

"Get away from me!" As he scrambled backwards, the white mech's arm came up and caught Ratchet across the cheek. It stung, but it barely moved him, Ratchet was a solidly built mech, and the addict had been hovering close to death for nearly two weeks. He backed off, though. Being weak didn't mean the mech couldn't pull a knife or blaster on him. Prowl said Orion emptied his subspace when they found him, but he could have something stashed on his person. Hidden behind his spark chamber, maybe.

There was nowhere else to go except off the slab, so the white mech climbed down, keeping it between himself and Ratchet. His teeth and lips were stained purple from to much siphoning - he'd probably gotten started on ruining his oral intake once he'd destroyed his ports, and when he noticed Ratchet looking, he triggered his battlemask shut. Ragged fields swept around him like a whirlwind.

The mech had come out of stasis while Ratchet had been changing his energon drip, and he had panicked immediately. Not just the sudden jolt of waking in an unfamiliar place, but black, ugly fear that had snapped his tattered fields out like a sail.

"It's alright," Ratchet said, pushing his fields out to brush against the flickering, weaker ones of the addict, trying to calm him. "It's alright. My name is Ratchet and this is my clinic. You're safe. Do you remember how you got here?"

"I don't like doctors," he said, his optics darting left and right, looking for the door.

Ratchet snorted. "Primus' bearings! I can see that, you hit me in the face. Do you have a name?"

"What?"

"A name," Ratchet help up both servos and took a step forward, the white mech scrambling back a step. "Something I can call you? It's alright if you don't remember, you've been through the grinder, kid."

There was a long, heavy silence. "Drift?"

"That's a start." Ratchet patted the medical berth with one hand, and Drift never took his optics off it, like he was worried one of Ratchet's hands would fly off and attack him. "You're not a prisoner, Drift. You can leave any time you want, but I'd like to take a quick look at you and make sure all your new components are settled. I had to replace your ports."

Drift's optics darted, and for a moment, Ratchet was sure he was going to run. "I don't want to be cut up again," he said, at last.

 _Again_. It made sense, and Ratchet had seen it before, mechs who'd had parts of their frames cut away or hollowed out to carry drugs. And he hadn't been able to do an in-depth scan on Drift, not with his medical port destroyed. Everything had been touch-and-go. 

"No one's going to cut you up," Ratchet said, using his fields to smooth down Drift's ragged ones, like he was trying to calm a spooked turbofox. "I'm not going to do anything without your permission."

"Sorry," Drift said.

"Sorry about _what_?"

"About hitting you in the face."

\------------

"Prowl," Wheeljack insisted, "Prowl, fuckin' tell him that a girl like that is nothing but trouble."

"If she's anything like Knock Out, she's trouble." Prowl was sitting opposite Wheeljack, with Orion on one side and Tumbler on the other. He was looking over Wheeljack's shoulder at the news as it flickered back and forth on a holoscreen in the cheap bar, while Wheeljack looked over his at a sporting match. "Don't call her. All females are a huge waste of time."

"Okay," said Wheeljack, "so he sounds like a goddamn alien from some trash holovid, but the point stands."

"I don't sound like an alien."

Wheeljack took a pull from his drink. "No, pal, you really do sound like an alien. Tumbler, tell your boyfriend he sounds like a fuckin' serial villian."

"No chance, Wheeljack. You're on your own there," Tumbler said, shaking his head and lifting his faceplate so he could sip his own drink.

"Orion, listen to these two--"

"Excuse me," Orion set his drink down and stood. "I need a moment."

Wheeljack and Prowl were still arguing about bad holovids as he left, stepping out the side door and letting the cool air wash over him. The noise and heat of the bar muffled as the door hissed closed behind him. They were in the Stacks, a housing district that was collapsing into the Dead End or being consumed street-by-street by industrial interests. Anyone with enough money was moving away and anyone with to little was being forced out. He didn't live all that far from here, neither did Prowl and Tumbler, and the situation distressed him.

He was a mech who enjoyed the company of others, but involving them now would be selfish.

\-- valorousGrace [VG] sent prismPower [PP] a message! --

VG: Hello, is this Sunbeam? I am sorry to call you at this hour.  
PP: Do I~~~ know you~  
PP: Are you with the gallery~  
VG: No, Knock Out gave me the address for your private comm.  
PP: I see~  
VG: ...and I was wondering if you could introduce me to someone.


	14. The Lovers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The beginning of the end.

"I can't possibly fix your dental chips if you wont open your battlemask!" Knock Out turned around. "Ratchet, he won't open his battlemask!"

Drift was sitting on the medical slab in the examination room, having been moved there from critical care just yesterday. His fields were recovering, but they filled the room with a swirling buzz of energy, like a sky threatening rain. He clearly wasn't used to reigning them in to what would have been socially acceptable levels. In a way, he reminded Ratchet of Orion, far to easy to read.

"Mmmm, yes, of course. You know, not every patient is going to be as cooperative as an Academy medical droid, Knock Out." Ratchet barely looked up from the papers he was grading. "This is good practice."

"Fiiiiiiine," Knock Out drawled, torturing the word out into three syllables. " _Please_ open your battlemask."

Drift's engines made a grinding, uncomfortable sounding noise, and he squirmed on the slab. "I don't like doctors," he said, at last.

"Primus, _no_." Knock Out rolled his optics. "I never would have guessed. At least you didn't hit me in the face."

"That was an accident," Drift protested. "I was confused."

"This is getting us nowhere," Knock Out huffed, folding his arms over each other and glaring daggers at Ratchet. "Can I go? I'm supposed to be meeting some friends tonight. I have plans."

Ratchet chuckled, "Then you can go when Drift's dental chips are fixed. If you get it done soon, you won't even be late."

They had been at it for hours. Around the three hour mark, (after much begging, pleading, and coaxing on Knock Out's part) he had finally convinced Drift to allow him to plug in and do a simple scan. Despite that, letting Knock Out touch his mouth or put anything inside of it appeared to be very firmly out of the question. 

\-- finishLine [FL] sent medicAlert [FL] a message! --

FL: He's impossible, Ratchet.  
MA: I meant what I said, not every patient is going to be a training dummy or an anatomical model.  
MA: People are difficult, they think they know better than you, and sometimes they will. A patient needs to be on board with their treatment, or you'll get nowhere. They need to trust you.  
MA: Sometimes they'll need you to help them understand, and--  
MA: Sometimes doing nothing is the right thing.  
FL: How about right now?  
FL: I mean, he's not about to rejoin the Well, Ratchet. His chips are stained, they're not falling out.  
FL: This is a cosmetic procedure by _anyone's_ estimation.  
MA: Yes, but--  
FL: But what?  
MA: I can't very well turn him out on the streets. He's homeless, Knock Out, and the rates of recidivism for addicts are astronomical. Who knows what would happen to him!?  
FL: Primus' bearings! You old bastard. If you've got some weird fetish for racers you've conveniently forgotten to mention, don't bring me into it.  
MA: Show some respect for your teachers, sparkling.  
MA: I haven't 'forgotten' anything, and you're mistaking racers for medivac jets.

"Ungh." Knock Out vented heavily and glanced up at Drift. "If you open your battlemask for one minute I'll give you a pack of candy."

Drift considered, and then gestured with one servo. "Candy first."

"Fine," Knock Out produced something out his subspace and held it up. It looked like semi-solid energon, in some kind of bright red-blue wrapper, Ratchet wasn't sure of the exact brand, only that it was more than likely rare and expensive. Drift immediately snatched it up, gripping it like he was a starving animal, though Ratchet knew he was near ninety percent full. He could see the readouts from the scan Knock Out had done on his desk. 

Knock Out snapped his fingers, claws glinting. "Battlemask."

Drift shook his head and subspaced the candy, his battlemask didn't budge. Ratchet couldn't help it, he half-bent over his desk, laughing.

Knock Out slammed his surgical claws down on either side of Drift, his engines roaring in fury and agitation. "You think that's funny!? You've got to open that stupid mask to eat it."

Drift shrugged languidly. "You've got to recharge, don't you?"

FL: Are you seeing this!?  
FL: Stop laughing!  
FL: Tell him to open his damn mask! He'll listen to you.  
MA: Someday I won't be around to hold your servo, Knockout.  
MA: He's cautious, and it's probably because your signal to noise ratio is all over the place.  
FL: He doesn't like doctors! He said so!  
MA: There are lots of mechs who don't like doctors.  
MA: But he'll like _you_ , if you treat him like a person and not like an obstacle to going out driving with your friends.  
MA: Your patients aren't distractions, Knock Out. They aren't getting in the way of your work. This is your work.  
MA: If you think Drift is bad, wait until you have to deal Senators who want to buy a diagnosis or who got something wedged in their valve.  
FL: That's... that's ridiculous!  
MA: Which part?  
FL: You can't be saying that--

Ratchet stood. "I have to go, First Aid and Nurse Joyride will be here in an hour or so. Good luck, and goodnight."

Knock Out groaned and muttered something unintelligible in response.

\------------

Killswitch spent most of his time in self-induced recharge. There was literally nothing else for him to do. Firebright ignored him, leaving him alone for days or weeks at a time, and each time he was terrified that his owner might be killed and not return. Someone came by to fuel him occasionally, but it was never Firebright. To hear the Senator tell it, he had many enemies, including Starscream, who was the Prince of Vos and commander of its armies, and who outranked even the Senators from the Greater Chamber. Then there was the Ultra Magnus, the Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord, who served Lord Tyrest, the Judge-General.

To make things worse, he wasn't even the only bodyguard drone Firebright owned. His owner had a pair of matched rifles who were spark-twins, Lasersight and Grids, who lived in the cabinet room (and Killswitch had already decided it was _his_ room and _they_ were the intruders) and they _never_ shut up. Their shared comm channel was a continuous stream of the dumbest slag Killswitch could imagine and whenever one of them started to flag or trail off, the other would come in and pick up the slack. More than once they had interrupted his recharge cycle with a staccato of pings and messages to try and needle a response out of him. He loathed whatever was limiting his comm, because he couldn't even answer to say he couldn't answer. Hating them rapidly became his favorite hobby. 

Both of them were well-made, though not the one of a kind masterpeices shaped by Adamant, because they _clearly_ didn't have blocks on their vocalizers. Firebright had purchased them from a mech in an unremarkable middle-caste who 'had no business owning rare rifles'.

\-- threeSixty [TS] and noScope [NS] sent firebrightsOwn [FO] a message! --

TS: heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey  
TS: u awake bro  
TS: i got somethin 4 u  
TS: buddy  
TS: buddy wat r u doin  
TS: answer yer comm no need 2 b shy we r all rifles here bro ;D  
TS: rifle rumpus party 4 lyfe  
NS: Las, stop. We talked about this.  
NS: Clearly, he's unable to answer.  
TS: o yeah  
TS: omp sry fo  
TS: feel kinda bad bc we dont even know ur name

It went on like that, stream of consciousness-style, for another eight hundred and sixty seven messages and Killswitch raged against every second and every glyph of it. Not just because it was infuriating, it was because (if he had to admit it to himself) he was jealous of their connection. They were the same spark, split between two bodies - so their inane chatter was just one person, talking to themselves. Neither of them cared if Firebright loved them or not, or gave a fuck which rifle he liked best. They were already complete, their circle closed, and they didn't need anyone but each other.

It was going to drive him insane.

NS: The point is, that even if you can't answer, you should still be able to initiate an automatic download.  
TS: yeah and we can send u some games we got a ton  
TS: bc i bet ur p bored over there  
TS: sitting + not doing anything aat  
TS: lookin all fancee  
TS: polished 2 the 9s  
TS: stacking block game fuckin kills it just u wait  
TS: get some wordpointmaker up in here so i can stop owning my sib so fuckin hard  
TS: ps i own gribs erryday  
NS: Grids.  
TS: dont want 2 brag here but im the alpha rifle when we split i got all the good qualities  
NS: Best if you just connect to me.  
NS: Las can be, to put the finest possible point on it, a bit high-strung.  
TS: lol ye

No. Absolutely not. Never. He protested in the only way he could, by venting hot fury into his fields and rattling around in his cabinet. There was no way he was going play stupid games with them. No matter how bored he got. No matter what. If he were capable of it, he would have screamed. If there was a 'worst' part of it, it was that he couldn't even turn his comm off, Firebright might message him. Not that his owner had ever messaged him out of the blue, but still, it might happen.

His venting was cut off by the momentary feeling of weightlessness as someone heaved him off his stand and clutched him to their chest. The surge of elation ending when he swept the mech with a surface scan and discovered it wasn't Firebright or one of the house drones who cleaned and fed him occasionally.

 _What's_ \-- Was he being stolen?

It seemed like he was, because the strange mech started carrying him away. It was intolerable! He wasn't supposed to transform unless he was with Firebright or being shown off or used by his owner's guests, but this could not stand. 

With a flourish, he flipped out of his rifle mode, twisting free and landing on his feet. He was face-to-face with another minibot, or rather, he would have been, if he weren't so much taller. The little mech was painted blue, with lighter lines in neat rows. It probably would have been a nice paint job, if he weren't so scratched up. He gripped Killswitch by the arms, his fields fluctuating and panicky. 

"Help," was all he said.

The mech was owned, and according to protocol, not to be acknowledged. It was unthinkable to even nod or shake his head to indicate he was listening, and despite any curiosity, he shook the minibot off. He didn't know what was going on, but he had to get back into his cabinet before someone found him wandering around. He doubted he'd be able to place himself back on the stand, but maybe he could tell Firebright that one of the servants had dropped--

"I have an owner!" The minibot clutched at his arm again. "His name is Rainwing, he's a student at the Academy, he'll pay you to bring me back! Please! Please, just listen to me--"

 _Owner_ , he thought to himself, _but if he's a house drone, isn't Firebright_ \--

"Ah, Recall. This is where you got off to." Killswitch jerked his head up as Firebright swept into the room, wings fluttering and heels clicking. He snapped his talons at Killswitch. "You, rifle, bring him here."

Recall wailed and tried to hide behind him, but Killswitch took him by the arm and dragged him across the room. He hoped he looked contrite, because he certainly felt it. Firebright would be upset with him for being out of his cabinet, and he'd never get back into the jet's good graces. When they brushed against his, his owner's fields felt poised and regal, like a predator waiting to strike.

Killswitch braced himself for a blow, but the blow never came, and Firebright reached out and brushed his fingers over his faceplates. It was so kind that Killswitch practically trilled with joy, or he would have, if he were normal. "We were just having a little party," Firebright purred, "and Recall decided to run off. Hand him over."

The little minibot made a sick sounding noise and sobbed with fear, but his owner was not to be denied. He was the most wonderful and beautiful mech on Cybertron, and whatever he wanted must be important. As Killswitch pushed him to Firebright, Recall wailed and screamed, and he felt his spark clench and contract. Whatever was happening, it was wrong, but he didn't know how or why.

"Good," Firebright said, gripping the struggling minibot in his talons and lifting him up. Once he had him secured, he patted Killswitch on the head. "Go back to your cabinet, and I'll come and see you later."

Disquiet warred with happiness inside his spark, and disquiet won out. He nodded, keeping his faceplates expressionless, not that Firebright would have noticed or cared about how he looked. He watched the jet turn on his heel and vanish out the door, the noise of the party drifting in like the roar of a distant storm.

\-- firebrightsOwn [FO] connected to noScope [NS] and started a download! [game file: wordpointmaker] --

\------------

Overload worked, studied, and wrote, and then worked and studied and wrote some more.

There was no clearing any of his previous infractions from his work record. The nebulous 'they' who comprised Management thought he had a bad attitude and Primus, they didn't know the half of it. He cut back on siphoning after someone from his shift told him his teeth were starting to look funny, though he still made sure to keep himself in the green. What he did take, he started injecting through his ports. When he told her about it, Redcap confessed that her dental chips were probably purple-black and beyond repair at this point, but there was no way to tell because of the paint.

He committed The List to his long-term memory, borrowing Redcap's stolen dataslate and transcribing it in its entirety without referencing the master copy. Then he deleted the copy and did it again, and again, and again, until he was satisfied that he could carry on without the slug. Just in case he lost it. 

While he was attached to the Array, he read the Covenant of Primus and committed that to memory too. When he was finished with that, he started on the Roll of the Primes. Eventually, he finished with that and moved on to Augmentus Prime's private journals. They wouldn't have been his first choices, but they were free and one of the few reading materials available to drones that wouldn't arouse suspicion. He combed them and lifted out the rules of punctuation, capitalization, formatting, and poetry.

"Is there even anything good in there?" Redcap asked him as they sat together in the bottom of the Array one night.

"They aren't exactly manuals on how to sabotage and destroy a spark experimentation facility," Overload said, "but the next time someone asks me what Augmentus would do, I can tell them that flipping a table or getting into a fistfight with a demon aren't exactly out of the question."

"So, we're in agreement that the Primes suck," Redcap said, "but I think we have a clear favorite here."

He tried to write a story of his own, to practice. When he came back to it a month later, he deleted it in sheer embarrassment without showing it to anyone. The next one was better, and by the fourth one he felt like he was getting the hang of it. By the tenth one, he had finished Augmentus' journals and moved on to Delta's. By the sixteenth, he felt confident enough to show it to Redcap. 

She read it straight through in one sitting. "Is it about us?"

"Yeah," he said. "Sort of."

"We don't get a happy ending?"

Overload shook his head. "No. Don't think so."

He was reading Solus' journals as he walked to work when Redcap commed him and told him not to go into the Array, because Consolidated Energy was back, and they were in the main hall, drawing lots. His spark clenched in fear as he made his way through the crowd to her. She took his servo and squeezed it, and then let him go so he could approach the stage.

It was the same mech as before, with her polished door wings and pointed teeth and ugly bodyguards. "R-Series. 6625," he said, holding out his arm to her. "I want to volunteer to go."

"Well then," she smiled, and for the first time he noticed that her dental chips were so artificially white they must have been replacements. "Good luck."


	15. The Messenger

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to write about Kaon, but I suddenly realized I needed to lay down some background groundwork. So here's 4,400 words about (mostly) not the DJD.
> 
> [deep, continuous sighing]
> 
> You might be saying to yourself, 'Pharma doesn't have high heels, he's got weird flappy clown feet!' Welp, I'm sorry to tell you that TFP Starscream's legs gave me a fetish and in BaS, all flyers have heels and fabulous legs. You might also be saying, 'Surely not Overlord!', but you would be wrong. If you can fly, you have heels. Sorry, I don't make these rules.
> 
> You might also, also be saying, 'Hey, Knock Out doesn't have a minibot!', and yeah, you're right. He doesn't. Not when he's a Decepticon.

The game seemed simple enough.

A player got a random assortment of glyphs from a pool. Then, using the glyphs they had drawn, they made words. Words, in turn, were assigned a point value based on complexity and rarity. On his turn, Killswitch picked out the glyphs for 'aat' and set them down, then waited. He didn't wait long.

TS: bro  
TS: wat lol  
TS: bro  
TS: u got to play u got to form a word

He kept waiting. There was no option for them to forcefully end his turn. The perfect crime.

TS: is this ur game  
TS: ur plot  
TS: ur scheme  
TS: ur enchantment  
TS: omp  
TS: fo finish ur tuuuuuuuurn  
NS: Las, wait.  
NS: I think he wants you to translate.  
TS: :O  
TS: lol  
TS: at all times  
TS: as in  
TS: 'grids is annoying aat'

Killswitch pulled his pieces back and skipped his turn. When it came back to him, he set up the glyphs for 'omp'.

TS: i c ur angle now  
TS: oh my primus  
TS: as in  
TS: 'ur taking forever omp'

The next round, he spent a few turns scrambling his glyphs until he found ones he liked and arranged them to spell 'why'.

TS: bro  
TS: ill be totes real wit u about fb  
TS: bc he _can_

\------------

Pharma of Vos was born the morning after the Night of One Billion Sparks, and was in the second stage of the Cybertronian life-cycle.

There had been, as Ratchet had noted to Knock Out, quite a lot of fuss over him. Malleus' experiments on sparks, as well as his creation of the drones, had damaged the All-Spark so badly that even the Primes had feared it might never recover. The first trickle of sparks had assuaged some of the Twin Suns' fears, even if the Cybertronians who emerged had been dull, unremarkable things.

Pharma had come to the northern shores of the Well on the morning of the first day, following the Messenger's mottled green stars. He had been examined by the priests there and then taken to Vos, and that had suited him very well. He certainly had Vosian traits in abundance - beauty, wit, pride, and intelligence, to name a few. Ratchet sometimes thought that all the attention had gone to his helm.

The priests had sent Ratchet a scan of Pharma's abnormal spark (when they had still seen fit to involve him in religious affairs), which was astonishingly similar to his own. Pure white and smooth, lacking any imperfections and turning at a ponderous rate - though every few rotations, Pharma's spark would change frequencies, dissolving into a ball of blue lightning that strained against the walls of his chamber before inevitably returning to its original form.

Ratchet knew the spark well, its every turn and pulse, as his own had merged with it on a thousand occasions. The moment of anticipation and then sudden thrill as the frequency spun, the rush of calm as it leveled out and spun back. There had been a time when physicians would have tried to correct such an obvious 'flaw', but with Malleus dead, he had simply sent a reply that if the sparkling was otherwise healthy, he would not approve of any medical intervention.

It had been the right thing to do. Pharma had proved an exceptional student, a truly Forged medic, brought forth by the All-Spark into a world that had direly needed him. At the time, he had believed that nothing could have been worse for Cybertron than the war between Malleus and the Twin Suns, and in time, he would wish that that was true.

Six years into his education, he had left Vos and come to Iacon, to study under Ratchet. To hear him tell it, they didn't teach medics how to repair ground-based Cybertronians there, or constructed ones of any kind and he wanted to learn. After he had graduated they had become collegues, then friends, then lovers. Ratchet had considered asking for his oaths more than once, but always stopped just short, convinced that his lover would find someone closer to his own age.

There was no denying that Pharma was beautiful. He would have been shorter than Ratchet if not for his heeled pedes, and his wings fluttered as he crossed the lecture hall. He wasn't young anymore, but in the latter part of his secondary life-cycle he still looked graceful, sharp, and poised. Ratchet couldn't help but to wonder if he had gotten painted and detailed just to come here, and at the very least he had gotten his talons done. Student heads turned as the jet passed, and Ratchet bit down on a chuckle. 

"This," Ratchet said as he watched the jet approach, "is my dear friend, Pharma. Some of you may know of him already, he's the head of Vosian Medical Elect. He's come all the way from Vos to help me teach a special segment of the class. I trust you will all be on your best behavior."

"Hello sparklings," Pharma said, over the idling purr of his powerful flight engines. He came to the front of the hall and sat against Ratchet's desk, drumming his talons on the tabletop.

There was an immediate barrage of pings to his comm, it was hardly surprising. Pharma was part of the nobility as well the Medical Elect, a veritable celebrity, and not just in Vos. He and his trinemates had been all over the news, ever since he had managed to talk the Vosian Electors around to supporting the Ultra Magnus and the Prince. Ratchet dismissed all of the queries out of hand. "I'll explain everything," he said, "and I'll take questions once I've explained."

Someone in the back of the hall raised their servo.

"Questions that _aren't_ related to the current political theater," Ratchet snapped, and whoever owned the servo yanked it back. He'd had enough politics for a dozen lifetimes, though he knew Pharma would disagree. The jet saw politics and medicine as hopelessly intertwined, with no progress possible unless it was on both fronts. "For the moment, we're going to discuss combining."

The class erupted into a low roar of curious murmurs and half-shouted questions. Energy fields pushed outwards in excitement and curiosity, overlapping beyond what would have been considered socially graceful and filling the hall.

"I said after I explained," Ratchet said with a frown and a glare that quieted the students. Pharma chuckled, his wings fluttering and then settling back into a resting position that indicated ease. 

"Ratchet, dear, these lovely little sparklings are just curious."

"Then they should be listening and not talking. I promise there will time for questions and full frame scans." He gestured to the holoprojector and brought up a diagram, and then another to overlay across it. His own frame schematic, and Pharma's. "Now, combining involves frame merging between two or more Cybertronians. _Any_ Cybertronian can combine with any other Cybertronian, regardless of their frame-types. Compatibility is, unfortunately, the simple part."

"Combining involves not just unity of frame, but of mind, and spark, and purpose. If any two of you tried to combine, nothing bad would happen, it's just very likely that you'd fail. It requries a potent emotional connection to your partner or partners. Combining is full-frame merging - the result a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and it's different from attaching, or linking, which most minibots are made to do--"

"Are you and Elector Pharma going to combine!?" It was Neon, was watching them was an expression that made Ratchet worry she was seconds away from perching on one of the lecture hall's tables.

"Yes," there was a pause as Pharma remotely checked the class list, and his smile nearly melted her, "Neon, we're going to combine. Right now, in fact, to save you from any more of this boring lecture."

\-- medicAlert [MA] sent causticChirurgeon [CC] a message! --

MA: You do this every year.  
CC: Ratchet, Caduceus is just as well suited as we are to teach this lesson.  
CC: More so, actually.  
CC: Give the poor sparklings what they want.  
MA: Caduceus can be somewhat... high-strung, you know that.  
MA: And another thing--  
CC: That's nonsense and you know it. Caduceus has never done anything wrong.  
CC: Ever.  
CC: In his entire life.

Pharma grinned at him, and Ratchet felt his spark swell with admiration. The jet was not his first lover, not nearly, though he couldn't deny that they shared something special. Malleus had taken his CMO to his berth many times, and while Ratchet had adored his Prime, that adoration certainly hadn't been shared. He'd become a thing to be discarded the moment he had refused to do as Malleus asked. Wheeljack had been wild when he was younger, and all Ratchet could be grateful for was that they had passed over the initial awkwardness of their tumultuous (and failed) relationship and settled down into being old friends.

Combining was something that Pharma had wanted to try, and Ratchet had obliged him without ever really believing that they could succeed. And they hadn't. Not the first time, or the second, or the hundredth. But Pharma was nothing if not persistent, and he had insisted they could get it right. Looking back on it later, he would wish he had asked Pharma for his oaths, even if at the time, he had feared tying the jet down.

"Class," Pharma said, gesturing dramatically, "let me cut the lecture short. Your spark is your connection to Primus and the All-Spark, a divine source of light. You need a partner you can trust with that light."

He held out one servo to Ratchet. The fingers were elegant and long, with talons on the middle three as long as the digit supporting them. The style of the moment, and Pharma was a Vosian politician, he had to look good for the cameras.

Combining with Pharma was always a thrill. Ratchet's aspect was Earth, and he had followed the Pillar's white stars, shining and constant, out of the Well. It was the ideal configuration for a physician. Mechs guided by the Pillar were plain and unadorned, but possessed of nobility in bearing. Firm but just, wisdom tempered by kindness - at least, if you believed that scrap about horoscopes. Pharma's was Water, mercurial and shapeless and ever-changing, following the stars of the Messenger, who was always in flight. He would not have guessed a mech like that would become a doctor, but Pharma had surprised everyone with his unorthodox genius and solutions to medical riddles that had once seemed unsolvable. 

Ratchet took it, and he felt his entire frame react to Pharma's, a single moment of perfect transformation as their frames enveloped each other. He would have described the feeling as a river bursting up out of its banks, or a wave crashing over a water break. He had been suprised to hear Pharma describe it the opposite way, power channeled and shaped into a useful form, a vessel with a strong hand on the rudder, a river guided towards the ocean by a tower of cliffs. 

Then, there was the rush of gasps from the assembled students - the same one he heard every year, and they were both gone.

\------------

Drift did not like Knock Out.

His accent reminded him of the mechs who came down to the Dead End to vent their frustrations, or anger, or transfluid into frames that no one cared about. Even when he'd been at his lowest point, he'd known there was a certain type of mech - the kind from the Upper Districts - that you never went anywhere with.

Sure, they always had something to offer, enough shanix to stay high for a month, a washrack, even a warm berth, but when you left with them, you never came back.

Hell, he couldn't be setting a great example himself. He didn't have anything like what you might call a friend, but he knew some other Outcastes who looked out for each other. As far as they knew, he'd been dragged off by the police and never returned. 

He wondered if any of them had even tried to stop Orion and Prowl, but knew the answer was 'probably not'. 

Realistically, he could leave whenever he wanted to - though one of the Enforcers had taken away his siphoning tool (he blamed Prowl). Drift doubted there was any way to get it back, and he was going to have to find a way to get a new one. Ratchet probably had one somewhere in the clinic, there were plenty of legitimate medical reasons for them, but Drift didn't like the thought of stealing from him. Opening his legs seemed like the easiest way to get the shanix to buy a new one. It was better than opening his spark chamber at a relinquishment clinic, even if the money was better. There was always some mech who wanted to be a racer, even a beaten up, broken down one. That, and you didn't get withdrawal cravings when they put your spark in the vacuum. 

No matter what, it would be best to leave before Ratchet decided to toss him out or the Enforcers returned and decided to charge him with desecrating the dead, but the lure of spending just one more night in the clinic was tempting, and Drift was not a mech who dealt with temptation well. It felt good to be warm, and dry, and not seizing up from hunger for once. Some of the energon Ratchet was giving him must have been laced with something, because while he wasn't free from random pains or sudden episodes during recharge, it was nowhere near as bad as it should be.

Desperately, he wanted to do something for Ratchet in return, but right now, all that really meant was spying on Knock Out. What Knock Out might actually _do_ , Drift wasn't sure, only that he didn't like or trust him. Surely, Ratchet's prized student wouldn't steal from him or attack one of his patients, but Drift's disquiet remained. It might have had something to do with the way Knock Out had tried to bribe him with candy, like he was an idiot or a sparkling. 

He'd resolved not to take the other mech's handouts (technically stolen or not), but by the second day, temptation had overcome him and he risked a bite of the candy. The tasting had been hesitant at first, because he'd never had sweets before. It was soft and semi-solid on the outside, with some kind of thick, sweetened oil at the center of each pip. Once the oil had hit his glossa, that had been the end of it, and he'd gulped the whole bar down in three more ravenous bites. He desperately wished he could have another one, but damned if he was going to ask for it.

...and it wasn't as if Knock Out was a particularly secretive mech, he talked about himself all the time. It was practically his favorite topic of conversation. His reason for working at the clinic was because he owed Ratchet for keeping his arrest record secret from his sponsors. His reason for wanting to be a doctor was so he could be rich and famous. He did what Ratchet asked of him and he seemed to have a certain charm that won over the other patients, but not Drift. He knew better, and he wasn't going to let it work on him.

Spying on Knock Out mostly involved following the red mech from room to room and observing his activities. It was getting a bit tedious, because _all_ of Knock Out's activities appeared to be taking notes, watching movies, studying, and texting his friends.

"Shouldn't you be in class?" Drift came around the corner to lurk in the doorway of the common area. It was the room Ratchet had set aside for mechs who were on the mend or just in the clinic to get supplements or energon. It was a open space with clean colors, a few couches and mismatched chairs, and a holoscreen set deep enough into the wall it would have taken special tools to pry it out. Drift suspected that Ratchet had it set up that way because he'd had holoscreens stolen before, and he was right.

"Ratchet said not to leave until I fixed your dental chips," Knock Out said, his voice crisp. "Besides, I'm sure I'm not missing anything interesting. I'll get the notes from someone and watch the recording later."

He was sitting on the couch with Ratchet's nurse, Joyride, and his minibot, Click, watching a holovid. It was a movie about racing, and it starred Blurr. The teal racer was famous enough that Drift knew who he was, and he guessed he was handsome too, because Click and Joyride didn't pay much attention to the vid unless Blurr was doing something. Knock Out didn't pay attention at all, and he was leaned way back on the couch, Click sitting on his lap and his wheels resting over the edge, scrolling idly through a medical dataslate.

Click was owned, he knew that, not that anyone in the Dead End had been wealthy enough to own another mech. He'd known runaway slaves before, but they usually didn't last that long. You couldn't hide forever, and most of the Enforcers weren't like Orion. They'd occasionally show up in force and shake down the slums, snatching up anyone who wasn't Forged so they could be resold. Sometimes they took anyone they could grab, Forged or not, to sell at public auction. Click however, was perfectly at ease with Knockout, either while she attached to his arm or when they were just hanging out together. He seemed to adore fussing over her, fixing her paint, lavishing her with gifts and upgrades, or paying for her transports when she had to go anywhere alone.

"People steal minibots," he had said, as he walked her to the transport one night. "Someone took Rainwing's assistant, even if the Faculty doesn't believe him. So go straight home and don't open the door for anyone. It's not safe."

He had no fucking idea.

Drift stepped fully into the room and shuffled over to the darkest corner, watching from where as he stood, half-cloaked in the shadows.

Knock Out leaned up and half-turned, glancing at him, and even Click and Joyride were giving him odd looks. "You... know we can all tell you're there, right? Come and sit on the couch like a normal mech."

Drift crossed his arms. "I'm fine here."

"Alright," Knock Out exchanged a look with Joyride and turned back, "have it your way."

Drift considered it for a minute, then spoke up. "Hey, if I let you fix my chips, will you leave?"

Knock Out turned again and looked him up and down, those red-black optics flicking over his frame, critically. "I suppose so. Do you want me gone?"

"Yes," Drift admitted. The clinic, he thought, would have been a very nice place if Knock Out wasn't there.

"Fine," he vented and then beckoned, his claws glinting in the light. "Come and sit down and we'll take a look."

He had to will himself to walk over to where Knock Out and Joyride were sitting and lower his frame down onto a chair near the couch. There was a prickle as Knock Out swept him with a medical scan. _He's not like they were_ , Drift told himself. _He's not going to cut you up to put things inside you. He's--_

"Here, take a look." Knock Out plucked a dataslate up from the ones scattered on the table and navigated through the menus before thrusting it into his hands. It looked expensive and it probably belonged to Ratchet, so he didn't drop it. On the screen there were all kinds of pictures of dental chips, shot from different angles. 

"Whose's chips are these?"

"Yours, Ratchet probably took these out of the scan I did the other day." Knock Out set Click down on the table and gestured as he moved to Drift's side. "They're stained pretty badly, but there's no rot or cracking, so you're lucky there. Nothing needs to be pulled."

"I, uh, okay?" Drift gripped the dataslate as Knock Out leaned over and flipped through a couple of the pictures and their fields brushed. The would-be medic was a Fire mech if ever there had been one, and his fields felt like a low, smouldering warmth. He wondered if it was something he was affecting on purpose, or if Knock Out was just like that. Whatever it was, it left an impression, and whenever he thought of Fire mechs, Knock Out would come to mind. That was, of course, until he met Megatron.

"I just want to explain it all to you, so you know what you're getting into. Normally with stained chips, we'd bleach them out and then dye them back to their original color. With you, the problem is that we don't know your original color, but for chips, personally, I think you can't do wrong with white. I'll draw up some schematics, to show you what it's going to look like--"

"That's not--" Drift squirmed. "You don't have to do that, just get it over with, please."

"Not exactly a ringing endorsement," Knock Out said, frowning. "You seem uncomfortable."

"I _am_ uncomfortable. I don't like doctors." There was no point in explaining why. Knock Out wouldn't believe him, or care.

"I understand, I can see you've had a lot of work done, and not all of it necessary or well done--"

Drift froze, but of course, he had begrudgingly allowed Knock Out run a scan a day before.

"--but this isn't like that, fixing your chips isn't going to be invasive. At worst, all you're going to feel a bit of pressure when I apply the bleaching agent. I won't cut you, or put anything inside your mouth. If you want," Knock Out went on, "we can do one chip, the left first incisor, and if you're to uncomfortable to go on, we'll stop. Oh, and you need to try not to swallow any of the agent, it's not bad for you, but it tastes disgusting."

"Okay." Drift forced the word out of his vocalizer and nodded, tilting his helm up.

"Drift," said Knock Out, patiently, "I need you to open your battlemask."

"Right, yeah." He triggered it open and offlined his optics. 

Knock Out hummed and hooked a claw under his chin, turning his helm left and then right, as though checking some invisible angle. "You've got an excellent frame shape," he said. "It would hardly take any work to make you look presentable."

Drift drew a blank on that one, and he slid his optic shutters up, squinting. "Thanks?"

"You're welcome." He beamed. "Do you want to hold Click's servo?"

"What?" Knock Out's minibot had come to the edge of the table and held it out, waiting. Drift stared at her.

"I mean," she said, "if you're nervous. It might make you feel better."

"That's so stupid, I--" Drift cringed, because Click's face fell, and she looked devastated. "No, wait. Of course I do." He reached out, and enveloped her tiny servo with his own, much larger one. "Much better," he lied.

"First one," Knock Out said. "Close your intake, but not your mouth." He flipped his claws around into a medical tool that Drift didn't recognize and reached over, pressing it to Drift's dental chip. He willed himself not to move or jerk away, and there was a light discomfort as the pressure increased and then vanished. "All done."

"That's it?" Drift blinked, staring up at him. "That was like, one second. You didn't even _do_ anything."

"That's it," he gestured with the servo he wasn't using. "Click, show him."

"Okay, Knock Out." She let go of his hand and produced a mirror from her subspace (and Drift found himself completely unsurprised that she had one), holding it up. Knock Out was right. One of chips was gleaming white and looked brand new, if a bit in need a polishing. "It looks good," Click said, "but a little silly, with just the one done."

"Of course it looks good." Knock Out's engines purred. "Because _I_ did it, but you know how I feel about looking good, don't you Click?"

"That we can always look better?"

He grinned, and leaned down to touch finials with her and there was a light scrape of metal as she leaned into the gesture. Drift found the act shocking, quite nearly scandalous. It had a lot of connotations in Cybertronian society, respect, friendship, intimacy, even love - depending on the relationship of the mechs in question. He had never seen it exchanged between owner and owned before. "Right. We can _always_ look better. How about you Drift, are you alright? Do you feel up for another one?"

More than anything, that convinced him. "Uh, yeah," he said. "You can do the rest." 

\------------

Caduceus was meeting his students for the first time, and they were beyond excited to meet him.

He knew what he looked like, or rather, he knew what he looked like _now_. Ratchet and Pharma's early attempts had been crude and unpolished, full of bad angles and hidden secrets (and there were _still_ hidden secrets, cordoned off somewhere in the darkness of Ratchet's mind), but these days he was a creature of grace and light. He was tall, half again as tall as either of his progenitors. Heavy, but artfully balanced, with the step of a trained dancer. For the students, he brought up a schematic and expanded it, it showed him in his current form, as well his previous iterations.

"My commline is serpentineHealer, if you have questions--"

"Show us your alt mode!" It was a student in the back, Flux. Caduceus knew him, the mech was curious but typically average, and he was used to the sensation of knowing someone personally and still having the distance of only knowing them through Ratchet's notes.

"Questions over the comm, loves. I promise you, I can answer all of them." He pressed the talons of his upper arms together, resting the lower ones on his hips. "As to my alt-mode, I don't have one. That's not to say that all combined mechs have no alt-mode, but that I've never had an opportunity to scan one." 

Most of his life had been spent in this very classroom or in operating theaters, he hadn't been made for war or traveling. As his HUD steadily crowded with messages (Were the Primes secret combiners? No. How many spark chambers did he have? One. Could he interface? Yes, in theory. Was there still time for frame scans? Yes. How many mechs could combine? Were there teams? What was the upper limit? As many as could find a shared purpose. The Great Combination supposedly contained over a thousand sparks. What was his horoscope? The Corpse, Water and Earth, which was sometimes called 'Clay'.), he flicked his gaze out over the seats and he saw that Knock Out's was empty.

_For Primus' sake,_ he thought, for the first time, _not again._


	16. The Ewer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Overload/Kaon, the character this story is actually about, is back in this one! About 5200 words this chapter.
> 
> Also, the mystery of who [RW] from Chapter 9 is, is solved.

What surprised Orion the most about Knock Out's relationship with his friend Sunbeam was that it had started before she became famous. Knock Out's friends, like his appearance, were carefully cultivated projects. According to Ratchet, he spent most of his time attaching himself to students who were already wealthy or the ones he thought mostly likely rise to the top.

She was also, without reservation, the most beautiful Cybertronian he had ever seen. Her alt-mode, he guessed, was a light-model racer of some kind, and she was a brilliant yellow-gold in color. Orange biolights accented the flow of her body, and to him, her doorwings looked like Wheeljack's. They curved up over her shoulders, and were virtually all glass. She was much, much smaller than he was, just barely waist height, and she walked with a graceful step, like a dancer.

What struck him most about her was her age. While they were both technically in the primary stage of their life cycle (and thus, legally adults), to him, Sunbeam seemed very young. He had always assumed that the mechs who were taken for the concubinage were... older. Ones who already had established careers as companions or experienced buymechs. Ones who were closer to the Prime's age, ones who weren't still cooling from the Well.

He was almost certain that she had agreed to meet with him as a joke. Perhaps her friends were recording them, waiting for him to do something embarrassing so they could upload it to the planetary data networks.

"You must be Orion," she said as she, raising her skirt a few inches as she walked up the glass path in the public park and came to a stop next to a sculpture of the Perfect Amica, Galata. He had seldom seen clothing, no one he knew owned anything beyond the tarps they sometimes used to keep the acid rain off themselves when the storms howled through the Low Districts - which were deemed unfit to have teams of weather controllers. To him, the steelsilk skirts that covered her interfacing panels and went down to her ankles made her look exotic and strange. A second garment of embroidered steelsilk was tied and looped around her chestplates in a drape that covered the seam of her spark chamber, an indication that both belonged only to the Lord Prime.

Sunbeam cut off his train of thought. "I'm sorry I'm late, it took me time to get away. I'm not supposed to be meeting anyone without escorts. You're lucky you caught me. I'm not staying at the Academy anymore, and I'll be... moving to the Palace soon."

"We could have met less publicly," he offered. "If you had no desire to be seen with me."

"Ah, but this place has _history_ ," Sunbeam said, crossing the space between them and looking up at him, her biolights whirling and pulsing, as though expecting something. She gestured to the art installation. "This is an authentic one of the one million, five hundred and fifty thousand, nine hundred and eighty-three statues of Galata that her amica endura had commissioned of her. One for each day of their bonding. True love. We should all be so lucky. Offer me your arm."

Orion felt his engines grind. "Is that entirely appropriate?"

"No," she said, and there was intensity in her gaze. The look of someone unafraid to call out the Senate in her artwork. "Under no circumstances would it be appropriate. Do you want meet Megatron or not?"

 _So he has a name._ It was, Orion assumed, a pseudonym, after Megatronus. The Fallen.

He offered his arm and Sunbeam reached up and took it as they walked, smiling graciously. "There you go," she said. "A proper gentlemech."

"I have seen your work," he said. "Not in person, but on holovids and in pictures. There are few mechs who concern themselves with the fate of minibots."

"But you're not really interested in it, are you," her tone was light, bordering on playful and flirtatious. "What you're after is my muse."

"That is not entirely true, but if you don't wish to discuss your art, perhaps I could meet him."

She pressed a finger to her lipplates. "I'm... still deciding that. A handsome Enforcer appears out of nowhere and wants to see Megatron? I doubt you care about the Cause, and it won't be helped by revealing his location to all and sundry."

"What is it you wish for then? Proof of my bad intentions?"

"Of course." Sunbeam had a ringing chuckle, it sounded like tiny silver bells. "...and I would also like for you to buy me a drink."

Orion blinked at her. "Are you... flirting with me?"

"Yes, is it working?"

\------------

Overload was leaving the Array for what was technically the first time in his life. 

Technically, because R-Series drones were largely disposable and they were produced in a factory adjacent to the Array to avoid shipping costs. He didn't remember much about the factory where he'd been artificially 'born' and he didn't know anyone else from Batch 66. Vaguely, he remembered there were teachers and doctors there. Not to actually teach him or heal him, but to make sure he was functional and capable of working. His first week of life had been a blur of examinations and proficiency tests, and his second (as well as every one that had thus far succeeded it) had been a hundred-hour work week.

There was, as it turned out, a train that would take them to Iacon. He had expected that they would all have to transform and be packed into shipping containers for the trip, but they got to sit in passenger cars. The seats were stripped bare, the passenger car was crowded, and in places mechs were standing or clustered together on the floor, but there was a window to look out of. 

If he hadn't been spark-haltingly terrified of what was waiting for them, it would have been exciting. 

As the train rose steadily over the wall surrounding the Array, he could see the square grey factory where he'd been born, the ugly, mismatched stacks of the hab buildings, and even though he couldn't crane his neck cabling far enough to see the top, the Array. It was big, it was just barely sub-atmospheric at the apex. 

Redcap was inside it right now. She had a shift, so there had been no chance to say goodbye. Instead, he imagined one of the coils of blue lightning dancing around the periphery was hers.

As they rounded a smooth curve and the Array passed out of sight, he checked his subspace. It was full, though there wasn't much in it.

The entirety of his possessions amounted to three cubes of energon, his siphoning tool, the dataslug, and a handheld laser cutter. One of the cubes was the one he had 'stolen' from Melody, Redcap had given him another, and the last one was a gift from the rest of his work crew. Overload suspected they had poured out their own minuscule portions to make it, and he found the gesture surprisingly sparkfelt.

The laser cutter was new. Redcap had bribed some of the minibots to steal a toolkit for her. Then, together, they had spent an afternoon tossing the tools through a security field to see what would set off the alarms. There was no guarantee they wouldn't have different fields and alarms where he was going, but it was better than going unarmed. And while the little cutter wasn't exactly heavy weaponry, he could probably do some damage if he caught a mech somewhere sensitive with it, like the neck cabling or optics. Brownout had been bigger than him and Redcap, probably more than double their weight too, but he had dropped like a pile of parts from a little lightning to the audial. 

It was an eight-hour ride to Iacon, and the train was packed full. Overload tried not to let the low roar of noise and buzz of overlapping fields annoy him, but they did. He felt the beginnings of a splitting processor ache, and all he could do was shutter his optics and try to close it out. While he waited to be free of the passenger car, he went over The List in his processor.

...but there was nothing he could do to block out the shouts of excitement when Iacon came into view, and reluctantly, he onlined his optics to look.

Overload didn't know it at the time, but the next time he saw the city at this distance, it would be burning.

The dull ache that had begun in his processor could not diminish how impressive it was. He could see the gleaming towers and the spirals of glass skyways. The black forms of flight-capable Cybertronians zipping back and forth in the city's airspace. He wondered if one of them was Runner - even if he knew that hadn't been the courier's real name. In the far, far distance, he could just barely make out the Palace of the Primes, shining like a diamond in the crown of the world. Beyond it was the vast gulf of the Well of All Sparks, the holiest place in the universe.

Iacon, he knew, lay on the southern shore of the Well, and though it wasn't visible, Vos sat perched on its northeast banks. Vos was a city for flyers, by flyers, and something inside of him yearned to see it. To be free to travel the world, and to belong to no one but himself. 

_Someday_ , he decided, right then and there. _But right now, you have a job to do_.

The train stopped twice. Once to pick up passengers and once to load the cargo cars, and Overload noted them both. Eight thousand sparks apparently hadn't been enough, and the reason they weren't riding in alt-mode was because their new owners didn't want them messing with whatever was back there.

He resolved to find out what it was and mess with it at the earliest opportunity. 

The Iaconian Array did not sit within Iacon proper, but was situated on the outskirts. It tapped into the heart of the Great Patropolii, Township, who had once served as the flagship in the Warfleet of the Thirteen. Historically speaking, he had been the only non-Prime to transcend elemental aspects and share in theirs, which was Light.

Township's Array looked depressingly similar to his own, and Overload wasn't sure what he might have been expecting. Perhaps only that the Great Patropolus would have been shown a touch more respect. From the elevation of the train car, he could see the wall topped with spikes, the slapdash collection of habs, and the Management office buildings. The only real difference was the steelsilk banner draped over the side of the building, emblazoned with the crest of a noble house. 

And then they passed it, the train continuing without even slowing down. 

Overload had expected that, but judging by the confused muttering and the questing, uncertain fields of the mechs around him, they hadn't.

The main gate of the Township Array faced west, and he tried to get a sense of where they were going as they passed it, but street layouts were an unknown to him. He mapped the turns as best he could, and when they stopped, he was relieved that he could see the Array's main tower. At least he would be able to orient himself, if it came down to running.

They were ushered off the train and into a processing station that was next to some habs. He gritted his denta when a scan passed over him, but no one came to pull him out of the line for having a weapon. After that, workers dug his designation plate out of his arm and attached a new one, reading 5C-8721.

"I'm in the R-Series," he said, in protest.

"5C is the site designation," the worker told him, and he was unceremoniously sent along.

There was no reason to be attached to his old designation, and yet the change still somehow offended him. 

"When do we get to go to the Array?" He asked the next worker, who took his arm and scanned the new plate, to make sure it worked. 

"Whenever they're ready for you," she said with a shrug. "Anything contraband in your subspace?"

Full searches must have been time and cost prohibitive, they were relying on basic weapon scans and for drones to be frightened and obedient. Overload did his best to look like the part, folding his expression into something he hoped looked dumb and forgettable. "Just some energon, it was a present from my old crew."

She nodded and sent him along with a dismissive gesture, beckoning to the next drone in the line.

He was assigned a room and told to go there. Soon, or so he was told, he would receive his schedule and be assigned to a work crew. Then he'd be transported to the Array. Right now, there was an influx of workers, so he would get time off until they got it sorted. 

_You are being deceived_.

Primus, he wanted to climb up onto the roof of the habs and scream it, but there was no point.

There were four berths in the room he had been assigned to, so Overload guessed he'd have roommates. Not that he had any intention of sticking around long enough to meet them. As soon as he got inside, he fished some of his cabling out from under his arm and plugged it into a wall socket. 

It took a bit of doing, but by the third try he managed to transform and stay plugged in. Previously, when they were getting attached to the Array there had always been someone to do that for them. Cursing silently, he sifted through his processor and brought up his measuring and quota functions, which were normally used to see how much electricity an R-Series was producing and ensure sure they met the requirements for the day's take. They were also installed to map nearby electrical systems, as an early warning sign of faults or cascade failures in the Array. He had never thought the program was good for anything other than taking up space in his processor, but now he needed it.

Silently, he pushed into the electrical system with questing sensors and started mapping. He didn't get far, but he could tell the habitat and office buildings were connected to a power station and the security blocks on it meant he couldn't reach much further. It was frustrating, but at least he knew what he needed to know, that there was no research facility on site. Something like would have used up a lot of electricity, and they weren't using all that much. In fact, if he had to guess, they seemed to be using the normal amount.

It meant the train, and whatever was inside it was going there, and he had to get back on it. He transformed back to root-mode and stood, going to the door and triggering it open with the panel.

"Hi!" There was a mech standing there, blocking the doorway. He was R-Series, and blue-grey instead of red-gold, smiling entirely to happily to suit Overload - which was to say, at all. "Are you my new roommate?! I'm R-2797, but you can call me Darkshock! I didn't think I'd have any friends here, but it looks like I already found one!"

He stepped inside, not waiting for Overload to move, and even with his tightly drawn in, their fields hit each other with a buzz of static. Darkshock didn't seem to notice, and Overload was left wondering if he was only mech on Cybertron who hated it. "Is this our room? Wow! Take a look at it! We didn't have rooms this nice back in Chiarou--" 

Overload stared at the babbling mech, the realization that Redcap had been his best friend and that he would never see her again was abrupt and painful. Maybe it showed in his fields, because 'Darkshock' tilted his head and blinked. 

"You alright, buddy?"

Overload pushed past him, and out into the hallway. "We aren't 'buddies'," he said, triggering the outer panel and slamming the door shut.

At the very least, it was a small consolation to know that he was never going to see Darkshock again either.

\------------

They went back to Ratchet's apartments at the clinic. He should have felt safe enough to stay at the Academy, and sometimes he did, but not with Pharma there.

What Sentinel would do, he didn't know, but the Prime had taken so many others over the years, and he didn't know if his spark could survive losing Pharma too. Surely Sentinel already knew about him. Their relationship wasn't secret.

"We could have stayed at the Academy," Pharma murmured, as though he could hear Ratchet's thoughts.

"Sorry," he said, it was the only explanation he had as he led them to the side door of the clinic, the one that led directly up to his rooms there. 

Pharma's hands were all over him, talons tracing over his panels. He was always like this after they separated, needing to be rejoined with eagerness bordering on desperation. It made Ratchet feel young again, and he wanted to be inside Pharma too, wanted Pharma inside him. Wanted him badly enough that he was sure it didn't matter how it happened. 

"It's fine," Pharma said, his voice low. "If it's disappointing in there, I can always raise your rent."

Ratchet snorted, and Pharma covered it with a lingering kiss, and then they were through the door. He fumbled for a lighting panel, missed it, and realized he didn't care. Pharma's fields were hopelessly entangled with his, coiling and swirling with need, like a whirlpool threatening to drag him under. His wings were held at their highest angle, twitching and fluttering with anticipation. 

They collided with a desk and Ratchet groped at it for balance. His hand swept across the surface and something clattered to the ground before he caught the edge. Pharma was sucking on his neck cabling, and he didn't worry about it.

The jet's lipplates moved down his body, over his windshield, and to the seam of his hip as Pharma lowered himself to his knees. His tongue was nearly as clever as his hands, and he used it to trace the seams of Ratchet's spike panel, smearing them with oral lubricant.

"Primus," he gasped out, triggering the spike panel open. By nature, he was a plain mech, and upgrades to his interfacing equipment had always seemed frivolous, even if he realized that most mechs got them if they could afford them. He was bigger than most cars and light vehicles naturally, if only because of his size and weight, and his spike was a simple white-grey with a single line of orange-red biolights on either side. 

"You can call me anything you want, love." Pharma looked up at him, his optics and the narrow line of biolights on Ratchet's spike the only lights in the room.

"Don't be an--" Whatever he had intended to say, it was lost as Pharma's mouth closed over the sensitive head, his glossa flicking over it. Ratchet's engines revved, and he shifted his grip on the desk. One of the ornaments fell to the ground and he heard it splinter, though the noise seemed very far away. He would deal with it in the morning, for now, he rested one hand on Pharma's helm, stroking fondly over his chevron.

\------------

\-- reaptheWhirlwind [RW] sent finishLine [FL] a message! --

RW: so okay  
RW: blurr infiltrated the arms dealers by being such a good racer  
RW: and diesel is his cojunx  
FL: Right.  
FL: ...but they're not cojunxes yet, that's not until the fifth movie.  
FL: The point is that the tension is there.  
RW: there are five movies  
RW: so  
RW: things just keep getting faster and more furious here  
RW: is that what youre saying  
FL: There are _nine_ movies, and they're making another one this year.  
RW: wow okay  
FL: Also hold still.  
FL: I'm never going to get all this slag out of your exostructure if you keep moving around.

Drift was sitting on the couch, with Knockout behind him, resting his aft on the back of it, his pedes on the seating area. Click had moved to Joyride's lap, though she'd occasionally get up and wander over to Knock Out, making some comment on his progress or helping him replace his scalpels. There was a little pile of them sitting neatly on the table in front of him, along with another pile of used cloths.

"I don't see the point of this," Drift had said. "Ratchet already washed me off."

"That was _weeks_ ago," said Knock Out, barely concealing a note of horror. "Besides, he just removed everything on the surface and sterilized your ports. You need to be _properly_ detailed."

He'd been apprehensive at first, but since being cleaned apparently didn't involve being cut or opened, he agreed to it. It had led them here, watching a movie while Knock Out had worked on his arm first. If Drift had to admit it, it felt good to be able to move the limb without the feeling of dust and grime grinding through his gears. They were putting a good clip into Blurr's holovids too. _Double Punishment_ , _Battle of Termination_ , and _Quadruple Justice_ had all preceded the cinematic masterpiece that Knock Out called the _Furious_ series.

"They're perfect movies," Knock Out said. "Let me explain why--"

He was cut off by a thud from somewhere upstairs, and Drift jerked away from him. The finger-scalpel raked a long line over his plating, pulling up a curl of white paint that stuck to it.

Knock Out gripped the back of the couch with his other servo, not falling off, but coming damn close. "What was that?!"

Joyride stood up, her optics fixed in the direction of the noise. She was a two-wheeler, smaller than he was. Around shoulder height, compared to Knock Out. "Is there someone up in the office?" She touched her audial and frowned. "Ratchet's comm is off."

There was another rattle, a crash and then a splintering noise.

"I'm calling the police," Knock Out said, but Drift caught him with his wrist with his halfway to his audial. 

"Don't," he said. "The clinic's a secret." 

There was more to it. Knock Out, Drift had no doubt, had ownership scans for Click. Joyride, however, was Ratchet's nurse, and Drift gave it even odds that she hadn't been emancipated. He didn't think Ratchet was the type of mech to own anyone, but freeing more than three drones per ten solar sweeps was illegal. It was possible he had bought her with the intent of freeing her in the future (which Drift would later learn was exactly the case), and she was a nurse with all sorts of training and upgrades. She was probably worth a small fortune, and Knock Out was a sheltered Academy bot. He didn't know enough to be afraid of the police. They would grab her and sell her, if they thought they could get away with it.

Knock Out looked to Joyride, who nodded frantically in agreement. "Call Orion then. He already knows about this place."

Joyride shook her helm. "I already tried, his comm's off too."

Drift glanced between them, and then at Click, who was clinging to the back of the couch, optics wide. "Go lock yourselves in the isolation room and I'll handle this."

"You heard him," Knock Out picked Click up and handed her over to Joyride. The minibot made a worried noise.

"I meant you too." Drift frowned. 

"What? Me? I can't. You're going to need someone with medical coding to override the lock on the isolation room from the outside."

"Is that a thing?"

Knock Out's engines emitted a screeching rattle and his servos clenched. "What? Of course it's a thing!"

Drift vented, harshly. "Fine, just... stay behind me and don't make any noise."

\------------

Ratchet tilting his helm back and moaned. It was to dark to see what Pharma was doing, so he contented himself with feeling it. The jet had the first two thirds of his spike in his mouth, and the talons of one hand were tracing around the delicate seams of the housing. The touch was faint, but each caress made him shudder. 

He was dripping pre-fluid, and Pharma lapped up each drop with his glossa, drinking it in like it was sweetened energon. 

"Primus, don't stop--"

It was then that the door burst open, and somehow, impossibly, Knock Out and Drift were framed in door Ratchet felt his processor stall. Wasn't Knock Out in jail? He hadn't been in class, so he must have--

The both looked embarrassed, confused, guilty, and shocked into inaction. Ratchet couldn't place it exactly, until he realized Pharma hadn't stopped.

MA: Pharma, for Primus' sake--  
CC: You know, in Vos, we're polite enough to pretend we didn't see anything when we walk in on something like this.  
CC: We're respectable mechs, up in Vos.  
MA: This isn't Vos!  
MA: Will you show some decorum, please?

Pharma's wings ruffled, and he made an annoyed noise and disengaged. Ratchet tried to stop it, but a drop of transfluid spilled out of his spike and hit the jet's cockpit as he stood up. For his part, Pharma pretended he didn't notice. With great effort, Ratchet opened his medical coding and forcibly retracted his spike, snapping his panels shut. He swore it wasn't usually that loud, but in the current situation, it seemed to echo through the room.

"You must be Knock Out," his optics flicked over the racer's frame, and his wings tilted down dismissively. "The one who wants to run for the Medical Elect."

Knock Out's fields were curling so tightly in embarrassment Ratchet feared they would reach the visible spectrum. "I am so, so sorry," he said, then bolted off. Drift followed him a second later, without apologizing.

"See," said Pharma, with a wry smile. "They figured it out."

\------------

Overload went around the back of the habs. He didn't know the patrols, or what kind of security there was here, and he didn't want to be caught outside. It probably wouldn't get him slagged, and he could easily say he had gotten lost, but he didn't want to draw attention to himself. 

Getting to the train proved to be the most dangerous part. There was nothing around it except open space, and it wasn't like he could just walk up and ask to take a look. The doors of passenger cars only opened to the processing areas and there were guards with rifles ringing them. His only option was to edge his way to outer wall of the habs and lower himself down onto the tracks. They pulsed with power when his pedes connected with them, and it arced up into his frame, but the overflow didn't hurt him. It was nothing compared to Array.

Even glancing contact would probably have killed a normal mech, and he guessed it was why the tracks themselves weren't guarded. He thought of Brownout and how quickly the bulky car had dropped, and he extended his conductors. As long as he was here, he might as well get charged up, in case he had to fight. 

He crept along the tracks as silently as he could, sometimes on all fours and pressed against the wall that served as a barrier against accidental contact. He was reasonably confident that any noise he was making was muffled by the steady of thrums of power and the mechs above him, crowding everywhere. It was still far from stealthy. At the right angle, one of the guards might look down and see him, and that would be the end of it. Primus forbid, another fucking train might come from the other direction and smash him to bits, and even though he hated the deity, he prayed silently that neither would happen.

Neither did, as it turned out, and he managed to duck under the one of the cargo cars, laying on the tracks with electricity coursing over the length of his frame like a river. At this proximity, and next to the active train, his tolerance bled into the yellow, but it was nothing he couldn't handle. There was an access hatch here and the lock wasn't attached directly, so he clipped it off with his laser cutter, then scraped out a small hole in the dirt and grime below the tracks and buried it. The hatch was heavy, and he could only swing it open by bracing himself against the tracks and throwing all of his weight into it. His hydraulics creaked and ached, and not for the first time, he wished he had been born a car or a tank.

As he climbed inside, the interior of the cargo car was dark, and Overload sent a burst of electricity through his coils to to get a better look. There was a tiny walkway, just barely large enough to fit him, and he suspected it wasn't a walkway at all. It was only clear near the maintenance hatch, and it was to small for a Cybertronian with a vehicle mode. No one was supposed to be inside this car, and he looked it up and down. From floor to ceiling were skids of neatly stacked machinery, with designations that didn't make sense. He pulled out the tags on one of them and checked the designation plates, and found it read 5C. 

This wasn't the main site. It was some kind of storage facility for sparks, but this train was going there, and there was only one way to get in.

He eased his frame through the narrow spaces of the car until he found a machine he could scan. Changing his alt-mode was not permitted, and he wasn't entirely sure how it was going to feel. Malleus owed Cybertron a debt, or so he'd been told, and his bastard offspring had to work to repay it. It was why forced scans were induced after they came online, to lock them into shapes that would be useful to their owners. 

...but the lock wasn't perfect. It was impossible to make them that way. Transformation was an essential part of Cybertronian life, and while he couldn't be a car or a jet, he could be any machine that generated or channeled electricity. He didn't have to be a... well, a transformer. 

There was a disorienting feeling as his internals rearranged themselves. His conductors split and emerged from his back, pistons stretched out and realigned, and his dynamos sorted themselves into a better configuration for this new form. He didn't even know what he turned into, only that whatever it was must be basically compatible with his locks. Pulling the laser cutter out his subspace, he gritted his dental chips and cut the designation plate free from his arm, then discarded it under the tracks. Next, he cut the plate free from the machine he has scanned, melted the edge with the heat of the laser, and stuck it down over the wound, muting his vocalizer as he did it to stifle a scream.

It didn't look perfect, but hopefully it would be chalked up to a slight cosmetic defect and they would still carry him inside this mysterious facility and install him somewhere. Once they were passing over an oil reservoir, he'd open the hatch and ditch the original machine, taking its place on the skid. 

After that, he wasn't sure. He was making this up as he went along.


	17. The Captain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Optimus would be friends with his ex. All I'm saying. Also, Soundfave. Around 4,400 words in this chapter, and Tarn/Experiment 5C makes his first appearance.

Orion barely fit into the booth at the back of the bar Sunbeam had picked out, it had not precisely been designed for mechs his size.

Sunbeam pretended not to notice, and occasionally when she moved, her legs would brush up against his. Under any other circumstances, he might have been interested, she was beautiful and the Prime's claim to her meant nothing to him. It was more that he feared for her safety. As she had said, she wasn't supposed to be meeting anyone alone, but perhaps she found purpose in evading the rules set down on her. 

A waitresses came to the edge of the table and Sunbeam ordered for them both, then kissed her on both cheeks.

The Palace pays all my expenses," she said, in explanation. "I hope you like warmed energon."

"I work in the Low Districts," he said, daring to chance a smile, "and I will take whatever is offered. Though I thought I was the one buying you a drink?"

Sunbeam's fields colored, pleased, and he was immediately embarrassed. She was, he worried, far to eager for any kindness that might offered. It was difficult for him to see her as a mech whose social caste outstripped his own by leagues and who was fantastically wealthy - to the point that shanix was meaningless. His instincts as an Enforcer would have pegged her as closed off, with a current of fear buried beneath her lovely, sunlit fields. 

It was the bearing of a mech who was guilty of something, but how could he fault her for that? If the Prime had claimed ownership of him, he would have resisted as well.

When the waitress returned, she set down two glasses of energon so hot it was barely below its boiling point, and the steam rising from them fogged up the light hanging over the booth. Next to the glass, she set down a tiny bowl of cobalt shavings, another of slivered crystal chips, and then two spoons, which were laid to rest across the top of each bowl. 

He had no idea what to do with any of it.

"You're a civil servant?" Sunbeam took her own bowl of cobalt and poured it into her drink, where it dissolved. She stirred it with the spoon and set it aside, repeating the process with the crystal chips. It made the hot energon dark blue and sparkly.

That seemed simple enough, and he tried to mimic what she had done.

"Yes, an Enforcer, but you already knew that." Her yellow-gold optics were fixed on him as he mixed the drink.

"You don't use the same spoon for both, Orion." Sunbeam smiled, amused. "It changes the whole taste."

"I believe I will still manage," he said, and brought it to his lips, to sip. It was sweet, almost unbearably so, and he wondered how much the taste could possibly have changed. Sunbeam, sitting opposite, watched his expression, as though she expected him to spit it out. 

"Why did you become an Enforcer," she asked, changing the subject as she toyed with one of the edges of her garment. 

"There were few choices of career for me once my caste was fixed. I thought that as an Enforcer, I would be able to help people."

"And have you? Helped people, I mean. It must be an interesting line of work."

"I try," he said. "I would like to think I have. It is an uphill battle." 

"I like that." She raised her glass to her lips, supporting the bottom with her hand laid flat beneath it. Another catastrophic breach of etiquette he had made, he guessed, and filed the thought away. "That you recognize that doing right in our society is a battle."

"I did not mean it that way."

"That's a shame, because the Primes are tyrants, and they aren't going to give us our freedom. We need to stand up and take it." Her tone was strong, and urgent, the undercurrent of fear evaporated.

"Do you hate them?" The question was burning in his processor. "The Primes, I mean."

"Hate them?!" She had raised her voice without noticing, and a few tables over mechs were looking. Immediately, she reigned herself in. "Of course I do! Sentinel thinks he can take me to prove that Megatron can't protect his followers. They've enslaved half our race! They shouldn't be ruling us. They aren't... they aren't even Cybertronians!"

The assertion struck him, as though it was a physical blow. Worse by far was the fear that she might be right. "What makes you say that?"

Sunbeam glared across the table at him, he had touched a nerve. In the future, if he saw her again, he vowed to be more careful. It was no shock that she had strong feelings on the subject. Her optics flashed. "Do you even know where the Primes come from?" 

He had a guess. 

"I was never formally educated," Orion said, instead of giving it a voice.

"But you know how Ignition works?"

"Generally."

"The Well," she gestured to the steaming still rising from her cup, "releases a spark, and it travels upwards, gathering materials until it undergoes Ignition. A Prime is the product of what is called Second Ignition."

So there was a word for it. 

Sunbeam went on, undeterred by his silence. "Second Ignition is, in theory, the same as Ignition. Except instead of attracting materials, the spark draws forth part of the divine essence of Primus. Magic, light, and power instead of steel and protoflesh and glass. It's named after what it is, the spark undergoes a literal Second Ignition and remakes the Cybertronian into a Prime."

"...and this changes them, fundamentally, in some way? They aren't who they were before?"

"Look at the evidence," Sunbeam said. "Malleus virtually destroyed the planet. Sentinel is a rapist and a tyrant. Zeta is a warlord. Even going back further, Terra Firma ruled Cybertron from a throne built from her enemies struts, and the less said about the sparkless monster she was taking to her berth, the better. The Thirteen destroyed each other in a cataclysm of violence that we still feel today, the forces they unleashed have made part of our calendar unstable. They're as different from us as we are from a pile of parts. Think on that."

He did, and for to long, because he felt his fields churning and shifting and the weight of Sunbeam's stare. Isolating himself had been the right idea, but perhaps he had not done enough. He thought of Ratchet's fear and disquiet whenever Sentinel was brought up. How the medic didn't want to live in the Upper Districts or stay at the Academy. Ratchet had been Malleus' personal physician, and Sentinel was keeping him on hand. For what, Orion didn't know, but nothing pleasant, or so he was forced to imagine.

He thought of Prowl, the twitch of his doorwings and the feel of his lips and the weight of his frame. The handful of seconds when he came out of recharge but before his walls went up. The look of betrayal on his face when Orion had broken things off, helpless to give him a reason _why_. If he had put his processor towards discovering it or if he had simply taken up with Tumbler, Orion didn't know. He hoped for the latter.

"Orion," said Sunbeam. "Are you alright?"

"I am fine. I was thinking on what you said. I don't agree."

She raised one of her optical ridges. "With which part?"

"The Primes are not different, not in spirit, even if they possess more power. And even if they are different, they still owe Cybertornians a greater debt than we would owe to a pile of parts. Cybertronians are sentient beings."

"Mmmm... and if I told you that since you don't agree with me, you can't meet Megatron?"

"I would find that regrettable, but I suppose we would have to part ways."

She smiled, thinly, and flicked something out of her subspace. It was a wafer-thin piece of metal that had been folded in two. As she slid it across the table to him, she produced two credit sticks and set them upright near the drinks. From his perspective, each of the sticks was worth a month's salary. Either they were expensive drinks, or she believed in tipping generously. "I have to go," she said as she rose from her seat. When she passed him, she patted his cheek. "Good luck, Orion. Learn to flirt properly."

After she left, he unfolded it.

It was an advertisement, for the gladiatorial games in Kaon.

\------------

"You should apologize," Ratchet said as Pharma stepped out of the washrack in the morning, shaking his wings to get water off them. _Birds_ , he thought, even as he admired the curves of the jet's frame from his berth. All Vosians were birds, he swore to Primus.

" _I_ should apologize?" His expression was incredulous. "What for? _Your_ student is the one who doesn't know how to knock."

"He sent me a message. He thought we intruders. He's mortified."

Pharma snorted and rolled his optics. "Then _your_ student is the one who doesn't know how to call the proper authorities. At least he wasn't in jail, like you thought."

"Yes, Pharma," Ratchet vented, exasperated and still somehow fond, "it was a wonderful way to figure that out."

"What about the other one? Drift? Why are you keeping him here, hmmm?" Pharma leaned against the doorframe, wings fluttering in amusement. "He's cute, but not that cute."

"That's inappropriate," Ratchet's optics followed Pharma as he crossed the room and sat on the edge of the berth. It was large by necessity, he wasn't the biggest mech, but he was heavy and solidly built. He didn't normally sleep with blankets, but Pharma did, and he had dragged some out of a supply closet late last night. They were mostly on his side of the berth, tangled and messy. He'd wash them later. "You're being an aft."

"I know, love. It's just teasing. If he's showing real improvement, there might be a charity that can help him find an apartment."

"It's not that, it's--"

Ratchet's vocalizer sputtered, and then stalled out, even if he had no intention of letting it do so. There was another reason, even if he hesitated to voice it to Pharma. It wasn't that it was necessarily illegal or unethical, Pharma supported the clinic financially and was listed on the employee roster, even if he had never actually worked shifts there. Legally, it allowed Ratchet to share patient data with him should he need another surgeon to consult on it. 

It was that it would put Pharma in danger, and that could not be tolerated.

Unless he was wrong.

"Let me show you something," he said with a sigh. "Open a channel, and I'll transfer his patient files."

Pharma did it, and Ratchet watched him as he scrolled backwards through it. He couldn't read the jet's processor, but that didn't mean he couldn't read his frame. His frown, the position of his wings, his darting optics. "He hard crashed," Pharma said, and Ratchet was sure he detected a hint of envy. Sometimes he thought his lover needed to stop viewing life as a competition. "Twice. It's amazing he's _functional_ , never mind online."

"How would you categorize it?"

Pharma smiled, the traces of envy gone quickly enough that Ratchet thought he might have imagined them. "Am I back at school, Professor?"

"Maybe. I want to hear your answer."

"Damage to every major system. Full frame scans unavailable due to a non-functioning medical port. From the picts, I'd say he was injecting through it."

"...and what about after I installed the new medical port?" Ratchet sat up. "Check the scans there."

Pharma accessed them and frowned immediately. Ratchet had already seen it, so he waited for Pharma to work through it. He didn't wait long. 

"It malfunctioned. I'd categorize that as an end result of long term drug abuse. It looks like his logs won't populate before a certain date, but for everything after that date, it's working fine. It matches the files. Was it new or refurbished when you installed it?"

Even if a Cybertronian's medical port was damaged or offline, the processor would still try to collect and log data on injuries and auto-repairs. The port itself didn't actually store the records, it just gave a medic easy access.

Ratchet nodded. "New. Separately, those things make perfect sense, but together? His specific injuries, combined with a log that won't populate into a new port? How would you categorize that?"

"So I _am_ being quizzed. I expect top marks, Professor." Pharma smirked. "I'd say he was dead, but obviously, that's wrong because--"

He stopped, his vocalizer halting with a messy hiss of static. 

"Primus, was he dead? I mean, that's not possible."

"No," Ratchet agreed. "It's not. Unless Lunarus Prime really does look after his own."

Steelchanger Lunarus was one of the Thirteen. He was the Dancer With One Thousand Faces, the Paragon and Soul of Water. A mech who could take any shape and who had, according to legend, an infinite number of alt-modes. Pharma's Prime, if you believed he ruled any Cybertronian who shared his element. Lunarus was the patron saint of prostitutes, the homeless, those who were irretrievably insane, the very old and the very young. Unlike his siblings, his fate come the end of the Age of Wonders was unknown, and urban myth claimed that he still lived in hiding, among the poor and hopeless, to share their burdens.

"Or, another Prime healed him, but at this point you're trying to find evidence to prove a theory, instead of matching a theory to the evidence." There was confidence in Pharma's voice as he went on, and that was more reassuring than anything. "Drift had catastrophic injuries that damaged his medical logs, among them a hard crash and a circuit booster injected _directly into his brain module_. His logs are working properly now, and with no evidence of imminent relapse, there's no further medical intervention required."

Ratchet reached over and patted his thigh. "What I expected, top marks."

"Can you even undergo Second Ignition without someone, I don't know, _seeing_ it?" Pharma's beautiful features twisted into a frown. "I mean, it's not possible for there to be a Prime running around the Low Districts in secret, like some kind of... lowkey Bodhisattva, is it?"

"If it is," Ratchet said, "Drift was at least good enough to narrow down my list of possible candidates to three."

\------------

The machine weighed as much as Overload did and the only way he could move it was to climb on top of the skid and push it off with his legs. It was as big as him too, but still to small to derail the train, or so he hoped. There were a thousand terrible ways this adventure could end, and he didn't like to dwell on them.

He held the hatch partly open and watched the scenery flash past below, and his arms ached desperately from the weight, but he had to wait until there was a place to ditch the machine he had scanned so he could take it's place. According to his chronometer, it took more than an hour, but eventually he saw the strange lapping darkness of an oil reservoir, and he heaved them machine through the hatch. It bounced along the tracks, sending up a shower of blue-green sparks, and then plunged into the oil, vanishing instantly. The perfect cri--

Immediately, an alarm went off.

Fuck. 

Overload heard the echo of heavy footfalls and the scrape of metal at the car door as someone heaved the latch up. He yanked the hatch shut and closed it, feeling something pop out of place in his shoulder strut as he did it. He prayed it wasn't essential, and that he'd still be able to transform. There was no time to get back on top of the skid, so he wedged himself between two of them barely a second before a beam of light shone into the cramped car, searching.

"Oh fuck me," said a voice he didn't recognize. Probably a guard. "False alarm, the hatch is still closed. What a fucking piece of scrap."

"We should check the car," a second voice. Equally unknown. "The Director will peel our paint if anything's damaged."

"You think we can fit the fuck in there? You wanna move all these skids?" The light lingered over the hatch, barely a foot from his hiding space, then moved on. 

"Fucking look at it. It's closed, nothing fell out."

"I guess you're right, but what if--"

"What if _what_? You going down into the reservoir to find it?"

"Yeah, you're right. Seal it back up. Clear the alarm."

Overload wanted to weep with relief, and it took him a moment to unclench his dental chips. He sat there, wedged between the stacks and fearing they would return, for another two hours. Slowly, he unfolded his body and climbed back onto the top of the pile of machinery, taking the place of the device he had pitched off the train. It was a tight fit, but he managed to transform. His paint didn't match exactly, but all could hope was that there wouldn't be anyone checking his paint job wherever he was going.

\------------

\-- echoingSilence [ES] sent prismPower [PP] a message! --

PP: Soundwave~ Hello~  
ES: Query.  
ES: Sunbeam in danger? Under arrest?  
PP: No~ that's not that the Enforcer wanted~  
ES: Thoughts?  
PP: He doesn't even know how to flirt properly~  
ES: Additional query.  
ES: Proper flirtation techniques?  
ES: Instruction will be required.  
PP: See~  
PP: You're doing fine already~ My Soundfave~  
ES: Sunbeam should consider personal safety before arranging meetings. Not a Decepticon recruiter.  
ES: Sentinel Prime is not sane.  
PP: I will~ Just~~~ just tell him that everything is still going to plan and I sent someone along to meet him~  
ES: Confirmed.  
ES: Megatron has been informed.

\------------

When Ratchet emerged from his turn in the washrack, Pharma was sitting at his desk, going over Drift's patient files again. 

"What triggers it," he asked. "The Second Ignition, I mean. You must have had a chance to study it, when you worked for Malleus."

Despite what Ratchet had told Knock Out, the name stung in his audials. "That's true... after a fashion, Malleus wanted to live forever. He wanted no heirs. His intention wasn't to cause another Second Ignition, but to prevent it."

"But, Sentinel--"

"Sentinel was not yet a Prime when Malleus' generals decided he needed to be killed. They--" Ratchet stopped, and corrected himself. He felt heavier than he was. " _We_ were prepared to go forward without a Prime to lead the planet. The only other option would have been allowing him to destroy it. Zeta came later, despite their claim of being the 'Twin Suns'." He rolled his optics. "As far as what triggers it--"

Pharma pushed away from the terminal, watching him intently. 

"For one," he said, "the Second Ignition is attracted to sparks that are already exceptional."

"So you or I," Pharma said with a grin, "we could be the next Primes? What about Prowl?"

"You perhaps." Ratchet smiled wryly. "But not me. Malleus already changed my spark when he made me, it can't be changed again. Historically speaking, if we look at the Roll of the Primes, Second Ignition seems to occur during moments of extreme stress, danger, or enlightenment. And if Prowl has received Second Ignition, it will certainly make the case for spark equality and drone freedom very simple."

 _Or excruciatingly complicated_ , Ratchet thought. Sentinel was different from Malleus only in design. He, like his predecessor, wanted no heirs, and tolerated Zeta only because Zeta was a warrior with no designs on his throne. 

He would never suffer a Prime who sought real change to live.

\------------

Overload couldn't offline his pain receptors, but he did mute his vocalizer, shut down every system he could, and draw his fields down to nil.

He was blind in this form - though he had been blind in his previous alt-mode as well - and he didn't dare chance a scan, though he kept his audials online. Mostly, all he heard was metal sounds, the heavy echo of pedes, and the thrum and whir of machinery. He guessed he was in a receiving dock of some kind. Where else would you unload a train?

The skid he was on was lifted, then set down. It was hours before he heard the chugging engine of a lifter cart, but resting on the pile in his alt-mode was preferable to being on the train. At least no one's fields were touching his. He was being moved again, to where he didn't know, but the cart turned left, carrying the pallet down a long hallway and then right through a door. As they passed it, he felt a security scan sweep over him, but no alarm went off. 

Perfect.

He kept waiting. There was nothing else to do. At the very least, he wasn't hungry, his tanks had been nearly full at the beginning of this little adventure and with all his systems disabled and no need to move, they were still at ninety-one percent. If he had to, he could wait it out for days. Maybe even weeks. 

Lucky too, because weeks was what it turned out to be. He was in some kind of storage room for machinery, or so the few scans he had eventually done had told him. To keep himself occupied, he finished Solus' journals and went over The List. When that grew tiresome, he went back to Delta's.

Delta was his Prime, though Overload was already sick of Primes who thought they owned others, and he was the First Sorcerer. The Nova of Progress and the Paragon and Soul of Air. Sorcery was a lost art, though traces of it had survived. In the alchemical processes used to Ignite the sparks of drones, in the great factory-manses that were the Arrays, and in the handful of primal artifacts that had managed to stand against the ravages of time to reach the modern day. As soon as he owned himself, he was going to study it. Maybe he would even go on a pilgrimage to the Well of All Sparks, to visit Delta's tomb. Areligiously, of course.

Forty-three percent was what he tanks read when they came to get him. He was pulled off the pallet with the rest of the machines and put onto a different cart, then wheeled out of the room and back down the hallway. It was hard to tell, but the floor seemed to have an incline, and he wondered if he was underground. He could hear noise when they stopped, the pulse and scrape of tools and the voices of workmechs. Silently, he hoped he'd be able to transform out of whatever they installed him into.

A slot in the wall maybe, like the continuous crew. The thought of being trapped was disquieting, and he tried to get it under control before he lost his hold on his fields. If they knew he was another Cybertronian and not just a piece of machinery, there was no telling what would happen.

"Awww, slag," said a voice Overload didn't recognize. "Look at this regulator, it's all messed up."

He was almost certain they were talking about him, and a sharp kick that punched his plating inwards confirmed it. He kept his vocalizer on mute and while he screamed internally and prayed he wasn't bleeding.

"Fuck, don't break it," a second voice. "We need those new regulators. The Director will kill us if we're one short."

"Yeah, just like Spreadshot," a third, followed by a murmur of nervous laughter from others.

"Primus," the first voice again. "Don't fucking talk about Spreadshot. What happened to him was his own damn fault. He knew that fucking thing will find you if you don't have a dampener installed. I get they're uncomfortable, but if you're dumb enough to mess with it, you deserve what you get. Fuck me Primus, that thing isn't even a Cybertronian."

 _What the_ \--

He was fairly certain he didn't have a 'dampener'. Instantly, he wanted one, no matter how uncomfortable it was.

"It's still the Director's fault," the second voice again. "He let the drain go on for two long and all the drones died. We wouldn't have had to clean out the fucking containment cell if he had stopped it early enough. And what are we doing about this regulator?"

There was a long pause, as once again, other mechs decided his fate.

"Just install it in the very back, where the cameras won't pick it up."

He would have breathed a long, stuttering ex-vent of relief, if he only had a mouth in this form. Once they left, he waited an hour before he swept his immediate area with a scan. The position was less than ideal but not untenable, he was bolted down and partially bracketed by a wall-slot, but not totally confined. If he could transform, even partially, he could cut the bolts with his laser cutter and free himself. Even better, he was (at least according to the maintenance workers) out of sight of the cameras.

For now, he decided to stay where he was. His internals knew what to do, which was regulating power, even if his processor didn't. Site-5C apparently wasn't expecting an internal attack from a piece of their own machinery, so once he felt settled, he started mapping their electrical systems. Since he didn't know what a typical evil laboratory looked like, he zeroed on the two biggest uses of power. One was some kind of containment room, the other a chamber that lay miles below the surface of Cybertron. It reminded him of the central cylinder of an Array, save that it didn't lead to a Patropolus--

I CAN SEE YOU

He heard his plating rattle as he sent out a scan. Nothing. His comm channels were all clear too.

YOUR MIND IS SO BRIGHT  
AS THOUGH IT WERE THE MAST OF A GREAT SHIP  
A COLUMN OF LIGHTNING TO SPLIT A DAMPENED GREY SKY  
THERE IS NOWHERE TO HIDE FROM ME

Overload muted his audials. It didn't help, the voice was a roar of noiseless noise. It felt like something was pressing down on his spark, like he was being submerged in dark water. He was the regulator that had been thrown from the train, lost down in the blackness of the oil. Never to be found.

SO THAT IS HOW YOU CAME HERE  
ARENT YOU AFRAID OF ME

He struggled, desperately, to hold onto a coherent thought. Scans returned no data, he was underwater with no way of knowing which way was up. Panicking, he forced something through his processor.

no!  
i came to save my friends!  
primus stop please stop your killing me!!

And then, mercifully, he blacked out.


	18. The Lotus In Dark Waters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Survival is fury.

TELL ME ABOUT REDCAP  
DO YOU LOVE HER

Overload onlined so abruptly it was almost violent. He tried to jerk his limbs, and found he couldn't. He was still trapped. Bolted down in his alt-mode, back in the Array, surrounded in the darkness at the bottom of the world, part of the continuous crew.

YOU THINK ABOUT HER OFTEN ENOUGH  
ARE THEY GOING TO BRING HER HERE FOR ME  
DO YOU WANT TO WATCH

Or he was underwater. There was black, oily liquid oozing into his vents, frying his systems. So cold that when it washed against him, there was frost left behind on his plating. He tried to squeeze himself closed to keep it out, but it was everywhere, there was no escape. It was pressing down against his spark, with a weight he could not bear, and he was on the verge of a hard crash.

How long he had been unconscious, he didn't know. What the thing had been doing to him while he was unconscious, he didn't want to speculate on. His energy levels were baleful, flickering in and out of the red. Not nearly enough power to get to the surface, even if he could unfold his limbs. Could the thing read his processor? That had probably been why he needed a dampener, to hide from it. There was poison spilling into him through his audials and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He thought about Redcap and her hidden badge, and--

_You are being deceived._

The thought flicked a light on inside him washed the shadows clear from his brain module. 

Of course he was.

The Array was weeks behind him, and he had left it as a volunteer. He wasn't underwater, because there was no water anywhere near where he was. If he could feel it, it was because something was disrupting his sensors, and that was all it was. A sensor glitch. Forcing himself to relax, he opened his vents again, slowly. No water rushed in. There was no catastrophic failure cascade. There was no water. His spark had come from the Well. The pressure on him, though still uncomfortably present, eased.

Whatever had killed Spreadshot couldn't hurt him. He wasn't in the containment cell with it. He was a power regulator, installed in the well, an important piece of equipment. The Director, whoever he was, would be upset if something happened to him.

NOW HOW ARE YOU DOING THAT I WONDER  
WHEN THEY CATCH YOU I HOPE THEY GIVE YOU TO ME

The pressure lifted again, to something that was painful but bearable, like the clench in his tanks when he had been starving. He tried to empty his processor of every thought, the way he did when he was working and there was nothing but the gulf of the Array below him and the river or lightning through his frame. There was nothing inside him for that voice to latch onto, he was smooth and dark and empty. The overseers couldn't hurt him because he didn't care. 

STOP THAT

He tried to form words in his head, to sharpen his thoughts and project them without the aid of the comm. It was harder then when he had done it under the rising swell of panic, but he managed, casting them off like shed lightning.

no  
how about  
you stop

\------------

Drift followed Knock Out, watching the biolights on the other mech's back as he stepped into an elevator and ushered him inside. They were in the Jiara District, headed to his friend's apartment. It was not quite the wealthiest of the Iaconian public habitation districts - that was Meru, but the mansion-layered streets of Jiara came a very close second.

He didn't fit in. Mechs were staring. 

"Now," said Knock Out crisply, "Sunbeam is a a very good friend of mine, so don't say anything to embarrassing. Oh! And she has quite a lot of minibots that she's rehabilitating, so don't say anything about that either. Oh! And, she's a concubine, so _don't_ mention the Prime or anything about--"

Drift thrust about for something to illuminate this mysterious mech they were meeting. "Rehabilitating?"

"Yes. When they have... unsuitable owners, she usually buys them and either frees them, or looks for mechs who aren't at their limit for emancipations yet and tries to get them to do it. She's extremely dedicated, so she'll probably have four or five of them on servo." He tapped a panel on the elevator's glass wall and then entered a passcode. Click, polished to a mirror-bright sheen, was attached to his arm.

"And the Prime--?" Drift tried again. 

"You know what," Knock Out said, "unless she asks you something, it might be best if you just don't say anything at all."

"Okay," said Drift. "But what's a concubine?"

Knock Out's engines made a high-pitched, annoyed whine and his plating ruffled. "A concubine is," he began, and then paused, as though looking for a way to explain it. "A concubine is a romantic companion, similar to a cojunx endura, but one that you can't be Joined to for legal or social reasons."

That seemed simple enough, and Drift thought he understood. "So... that's like Pharma then? He's Ratchet's companion."

A flash of scandalized embarrassment so strong that it filled the entire elevator car ran through Knock Out's energy fields. "No! Drift!" He rubbed his faceplate. "For Primus' sake, Pharma is the head of the Vosian Medical Elect! He's part of the nobility, he's not a concubine. It's more like--"

Drift waited.

Knock Out smoothed his fields and tried again. "Take you and I for example. We obviously can't be Joined and become cojunx endura because we're in different castes, so if we wanted to be in a formally recognized relationship, I could make you my concubine."

That was putting it mildly, since Drift didn't _have_ a caste. Or maybe he had one once, but there was a gulf of violence and abuse and circuit boosters between him and it, and he sure as scrap didn't remember. "That seems simpler," he said. "Everyone should just be in concubines with each other."

"It doesn't work like that!" Knock Out snapped. "Mechs who have concubines usually already _have_ a cojunx endura. A concubine just... provides them with additional emotional or romantic distraction that their cojunx can't. Or again, for whatever reason, they're someone who can't be Joined to their patron."

"You know," said Drift, "I lived in the Dead End. You don't need to make up a fancy word for buymechs. I know what they are."

"Sunbeam," Knock Out grated out, "is not a buymech. Don't even use that word in front of her."

"Alright," Drift said, as much to end the conversation as anything. "But this just sounds like yet another way you high-castes have come up with to literally fuck us. How many concubines does the Prime have, anyways?"

Knock Out scowled at him and rolled his optics, like there was some sort of social niceties here he was failing to grasp. For his part, Drift was pretty sure he had things figured out. "I don't know, at least a thousand?"

That was an absurd nonsense number, but since all high-castes were slaggers, it made sense that the Primes would be the worst of all. Drift started to say something to that effect, but the elevator chimed and deposited them into the hallway of the building's top floor. Instead, he muted his vocalizer, there was no point in getting into a huge fight. Not when Knock Out was doing this for him.

The racer sauntered down the hallway, and Drift decided there was no harm in checking out his aft. It certainly had one hell of a curve to it, that was for damn sure. Looking back on it, his fixation on fire-red sports models must have started somewhere, and it could well have been right here.

Knock Out stopped in front of one of the doors, rang the chime, then entered another code into the keypad sitting next to it and entered without waiting for an acknowledgement. When Drift hesitated, he gestured for him to follow.

The apartment was a Seeker apartment, though he wouldn't have known how to identify one at the time. It had a huge, sweeping balcony that was open to the sky and extended outside the building like a runway. It was so large that one whole side of the living space didn't have a wall, but it looked like the balcony could be cordoned off by some sliding glass panels. The main room had doors leading off to either side, and the high ceilings made the place seem expansive and huge. 

It was cluttered. Sunbeam looked like she was alternatively in the middle of packing up her things and working on several art projects. There were work benches covered in tools, stacks of cut stone blocks and crystals laid out in an order that, Drift guessed, must have made sense to her. There were even neat rows of sheet glass leaning up against one wall, and it looked like she had more tools for cutting it. To Drift, it all seemed complicated and expensive. He reached over to touch one of the works and Knock Out caught his optic, frowned, and shook his helm.

One of the walls was dominated by a holoscreen that was twice as tall as he was, and lounging on the couch in front of it was some kind of bird-frame minibot, idly watching Cybertron's Next Top Model.

"Oh," said Knock Out, without further acknowledging it. For it's part, the red-black bird didn't seem to acknowledge them either. "This one's new. Sunbeam!? Are you here?"

"Knock Out?" Sunbeam swept out of one of the side rooms, carrying a minibot in her arms and wearing so much clothing that Drift didn't quite know what to make of it. She had the seam of her chestplates covered up by some kind of drape, like it was scandalous or something. He wasn't sure what he had been expecting, the buymechs down in the Dead End usually didn't bother with panels or, if they had been at it long enough, locks. 

A nudge from Knock Out reminded him that he was staring, and he forced his optics up to the minibot she was carrying. He had a vacant, disoriented look on his face, his optics only partially focused. Drift knew that look well enough, the little guy had gone and permanently fried himself. There were a series of welds along one side of his little helm that were well done, but still visible. If he'd been asked to call it, he'd say someone had smashed the minibot with a pipe.

He would know, he had a couple of his own just like that.

Another minibot was following her, loudly reading a schedule from a dataslate. He looked identical to Click, if a slightly different shade of green. She crossed the room to Knock Out, embracing him briefly before kissing him on both cheeks and touching finials with him. 

"Who's your new friend," she asked, before turning to do the same to him. Drift practically squirmed, and she must have sensed his discomfort, because she let him go without completing the gesture.

"This is Drift," Knock Out said, "the one we talked about before. You do have the IDs, right?"

"Of course I do. I have one for the arm port and a hard copy for him to upload. They already scan, I tested them this morning." She paused. "I'm sorry Drift, I shouldn't talk about you like you're not here. Do you want to see them?"

"What happened to your minibot?" The question fell out of his vocalizer, in defiance of Knock Out's earlier suggestion not to say anything. The medic rubbed his faceplates, venting in annoyance.

"It's fine," she said with a smile. "This is Flashback, and his old owner didn't take very good care of him, so now I do. He can't talk anymore, and he has some trouble remembering things, but Ratchet did a pretty good job fixing him up."

"Heya Flashback." Drift raised one servo and waved, and the minibot keened softly in response, then buried his face in Sunbeam's neck cabling.

"Speaking of minibots," Knock Out said, gesturing to the bird who was rolling around on the couch with glee, apparently over some new development in the world of modelling, "I thought you weren't allowed to bring them to the Palace?"

"Oh, I'm not." Sunbeam set Flashback down on the floor and the little Academy bot took him by the servo and gently led him away. "The priests said pets were fine, and you know me, I absolutely couldn't live without a minibot. So that's my new companion, Laserbeak. I bought him yesterday, but he definitely needs new paint."

"If your minibots aren't allowed to go to the Palace, what's going to happen to them? Are you selling them?" It was hard to be out on the streets, but at least he had a vehicle mode for running and a weapons loadout for fighting, if it came to that. Not that he'd been able to afford or spare energon for ammunition at any point that he could remember - most of his life had been a steady road towards ending up Empty, but most mechs didn't know a loaded weapon from an unloaded one.

"No," she said, "I could never do that. Pixel and Flashback are going to live with Perceptor, he's a professor, at the Academy. Eventually, once I can... work my way into the Lord Prime's good graces, I'll get his permission to bring them to the palace."

"Are you and the Prime in love? I mean, do you even _like_ him--"

"Drift!" Knock Out slapped his arm, but Sunbeam was smirking, amused by the outburt. "Sorry, Sunbeam. Sorry."

"It's fine," she said, "but you didn't come here to listen to a story about my romantic adventures." She glided over to one of the work tables and selected a small metal plate between two fingers before and retrieving a datapad. "The arm fitting, and the hard copy. You're a surgeon, so I trust you can install it. For the hard copy, Drift, you can just plug right in and download it."

Knock Out had posited the idea of getting him some ID a few days ago. A legal one was impossible, but he said he knew some people. He even had two or three fake ones of his own, for racing or for transactions he didn't want showing up on his Academy-linked accounts. Rich mechs even got to break the law with more style than poor ones. The cost must have been extravagant, but Knock Out treated it like he was buying a cube for a friend (though even buying a cube would have seemed like an extravagant cost to Drift). 

Drift watched as he took the dataslate and plugged into it, using one of the ports below his audial. Knock Out's expression didn't change, but one of his eye ridges shot up. "This is good," he said, "very good. It might pass a high-level security scan. Who coded it?"

"Just a friend." Sunbeam waved the question off, dismissively. "I met him at the gallery, he works in communications."

"Would I know him?"

She chuckled. "Probably not."

\------------

It was exhausting, both mentally and spiritually, to think hard enough to direct himself towards his mysterious attacker. 

The worst part seemed to be that he had piqued its curiosity, and he feared its malice was safer. 

It was circling him, or that was the impression he got. As though it were some ancient beastformer predator, a barely discernible ripple in dark waters. Every so often, it would press into his mind with a bolt of pain, like the sting of a null lash. Then it would flit away, retreating to a safe distance, as if to digest whatever it had caught. 

I CONFESS THIS IS THRILLING  
THEY USUALLY WANT IT DONE SO QUICKLY  
I HARDLY GET TO KNOW THEM BEFORE THEYRE GONE  
is that what they use the containment cell for  
NO  
THE CONTAINMENT CELL IS FOR CONTAINING ME  
why  
are you a demon  
did unicron make you

It seemed to Overload that it was laughing, a rush of noise like the roar of some distant ocean, or the steady beat of black rain.

HOW WOULD I KNOW

\------------

The destruction of all life in the universe was a long game, and if Skyflow had to admit it himself, it was one that most of the Void-born were profoundly unsuited to playing.

Some of them were just kill-crazy, thinking to take as many sparks as possible before they were finally put down. Hardly better than mundane spree killers who were simply off their processor. Others conjured up dynamic, world-spanning schemes that were little different form the detritus normally confined to fantasy novels. They too, failed. 

The Stair of Whispers, for all their might, had been captured and imprisoned by Solus' whores. Speedthief, who had tried to kill off the conspirators who were, in turn, trying to kill Malleus Prime, had only succeeded in uniting and galvanizing them when he had attacked that prying microscope. Cyclonus--

Well, quite frankly, the less said about Cyclonus, the better. 

Only that if his old lover--

No. He stopped himself. It was disgusting to even consider the past. He was above such things now.

\--but even if Cyclonus were somehow still functional, Skyflow was going to find him make him wish he weren't. 

There was nothing more undignified than suffering a traitor.

Skyflow himself took an indirect approach to destabilization. A push here, a pull there. A whispered word, a subtle insinuation. His student, Firebright, had been kind enough to propose several bills designed to bait out violence from this new 'Decepticon' rebellion, and in exchange he had showed the mech the pleasure in taking Sparks. 

Firebright would be caught eventually, or Adamant's little rifle would grow weary of the heavy servo on his leash and cut the Senator's neck cabling in his sleep. If he did, the blacklash against Adamant's drones would be spectacular, if he didn't, Firebright would be caught eventually and his predilections would scandalize the Senate. Either way, it ultimately benefited Skyflow. 

For the moment though, he followed the young Prime into his private apartments.

Sentinel was handsome, to Skyflow's optics, a striking creature with powerful lines and a solid frame. It was a shame about his personality.

He dismissed the guards, who bowed and saluted, fists to spark chambers. They didn't go far - the Lord Prime could be left unguarded, but Sentinel sealed the door and engaged a security filter, so they could speak privately. 

"Would you like a drink?" he asked, and Skyflow, whose nature made him unable to refuse the opportunity to consume, nodded in acquiescence. 

"Thank you, Lord Prime," he said, taking the flute of high-grade between two talons, "but I'm curious as to why I was summoned?"

"How is," Sentinel said, twirling his own flute between two fingers, "our little project?"

"Nearing completion." Skyflow eyed him, searching his face for any sign of hesitation. The Prime's fields, backed by the Matrix, were to powerful to be properly read, he simply shed to much power into the air. Skyflow didn't elaborate, he had no intention of giving Sentinel any more information than was necessary. 

"...and the... experiment? Explain how it works, again."

Skyflow smiled richly, looking up from his drink. "It's simple enough, we're extracting its voice to power the geoweapon, and using the overflow to make sonic weaponry."

The young Prime went around to his desk and sat, gazing up at Skyflow. "Your last report said it stopped working."

"Not quite, Lord Prime, pain simply became an... inefficient method for extracting power from 5C. We've found that letting it have its way with drones while we extract from it somewhat more, ah, indirectly is safer. There's less chance of damage to the site."

"Damage to the site?" The Prime's optics flashed.

"It's contained. I'll destroy it once it activates the geoweapon. No need to concern yourself with it roaming free."

Sentinel hesitated. "You said it wasn't dangerous." 

"And it's not," Skyflow said, with a rich smile, pleased that Sentinel had proved easy enough to distract from the subject of Malleus' planet-killer. "It's not a demon. It's just a specialized spark that you called here for a singular purpose. That _purpose_ happens to be awakening the geoweapon, but in principle, it's no different from Ratchet, and he's harmless. Where is your old friend anyways?"

It was a lie, of course. Ratchet was far from harmless, and he too, would one day grow tired of the Prime's servo on his leash. When he finally cast it off, it was going to be spectacular. Skyflow hoped to see it, but depending on how his hand played out, he also hoped to be fleeing the planet soon.

Sentinel rolled his optics. "Probably down in the Dead End, coddling addicts and whores. You said we're close?"

"Yes," Skyflow nodded. "We'll be ready for a test soon. I would suggest the Darok Holy Worlds, or perhaps Kaon, where these troubling Decepticons are based. It matters very little, with the Diamondback at your disposal, you'll be invinicble. The Black Block Consortium will flee before your armies, it will usher us into a new Age of Wonders--"

"Don't," said Sentinel, a firm note entering his tone, "call it that."

"I understand, Lord Prime. I didn't realize that you and the Diamondback Patropolus had been... close, before the... incident. You must have great strength," Skyflow said, steering the conversation to distract and mollify him again. He put one servo on the Prime's arm. "I can't imagine what it must be like for you to bear the Matrix for the good of all of us, considering what Malleus did, and the fact that it contains his memories. Naturally, the weapon can have whatever name you like."

\------------

PAYROLL IS DEAD YOU KNOW THAT DONT YOU  
did you kill him  
YES  
THOUGH I DONT RECALL HIM SPECIFICALLY  
HE HAD NO SPECIAL QUALITIES  
NO SECRET HIDDEN STRENGTHS  
okay but youre wrong  
he sent me here  
to stop this  
and im coming right now  
to do that

The situation was untenable. He couldn't wait here until he ran empty and offlined, bolted into the wall. He had to get out. The most important thing was not to panic and seize up his t-cog. That was signing his own death certificate. He tried each limb in turn, running his body through several partial transformation cycles. Between each attempt, he watched his chronometer, counting down two full minutes before trying again. The noise was, he hoped, covered by the steady hum of the other regulators. The workers who installed him had said he was out of sight of the cameras, and he had no choice but to believe it.

The bolts meant that none of his limbs could fold out properly, and he counted out five long minutes as his chronometer ticked along, forcing himself to vent evenly. This form was new, and there wasn't enough space inside it, and so he would have to make some. With a bit of effort, he managed to transform one servo, and he eased the laser cutter into it. Timing it, it took three more minutes of careful internal adjustment to press it against the elbow socket of his left arm.

what  
what will you do if i open the cell  
KILL EVERYONE HERE  
like you did to spreadshot  
NO  
BUT I MADE HIM KILL HIMSELF  
IT WASNT QUICK  
wont the dampeners stop you  
ONLY FROM FINDING THEM  
AND EVEN THEN  
WITHOUT THE CELL  
ONLY FOR SO LONG  
IT WONT PROTECT THEM FROM MY VOICE  
so like  
what im getting here is that youre  
even worse in person

It roared with silent, noiseless laughter. Overload was confident it wouldn't get far. Even if it actually killed its way out and escaped the facility, the Enforcers would put it down soon enough. There wasn't another one of these monsters. There couldn't be.

And either way, he wasn't going to be needing his arm.

I LIKE YOU AND IM GOING TO KEEP YOU  
FOR A LONG LONG TIME

He opened the List and set it to scroll. It was ingrained so deeply in his long-term memory that he could read it, even at this speed. There was no way to get into a meditative state for this, but he held his ventilations and waited for it to press close again. It didn't take long, and soon he sensed the pressure against his processor that would bloom into one of its stings. 

The moment he did, he pulled the trigger on the cutter.

Immediately, he regretted the decision. 

The cutter severed the joint surprisingly cleanly, but that was the only thing clean about it. Energon gushed from the wound and his systems screamed warnings at him. Not the least of which was that he was no longer able to work, and this was a deactivation worthy injury. Apparently, he should not try to flee and stay where he was and wait for someone from Management to come by and offline him. Scanning a new form hadn't got rid of that. Wonderful.

The pain was hot and excruciating, in a way that threatened to blot out all rational thought. Some part of him hoped the Voice had been reading his processor right then, and that it had felt that. Maybe he had hurt it somehow. It had fallen silent, at least.

His whole frame felt like it had pulled inwards on himself, as though it was trying to flee the throbbing agony in his arm. By the time he could think clearly again, he realized he'd twisted himself so badly that he'd torn one of the bolts out. Small mercies.

He kept the cutter firing to heat it up and removed one of the other bolts through the space his arm had occupied. It got his legs free and allowed a partial transformation. Enough that he could cut the final bolts. 

Staying upright was a challenge, it was all he could do to keep steady and he wobbled on his pedes as he slid off the wall to stand. 

_Don't fall. Don't fucking fall. If you fall, it'll be over._

The mouth of the cutter, where the laser blade emerged was getting white-hot, and he disengaged it. Gritting his denta, he pressed it into the lines hanging from his severed arm, melting them closed. It wasn't going to stop him from leaking to death, but it would slow it down. As he held it inside the wound, his visual field glitched and popped. The seizure he'd had inside the wall had cracked his optical glass.

There was no more use for the cutter, so he tossed it aside. With only one arm, he couldn't use a weapon anyways, and he needed his remaining servo free now. Using a shaking servo, he retrieved the cubes from his subspace and drank them, one at a time. His frame protested and threatened to purge, but his energy levels climbed out of the red. The last bit of the third cube he poured on the floor, for Payroll. 

_I'm on my way right now, buddy._

He went around the corner, calling up the electrical maps in his head and doing his best to point himself towards the control room at the top of containment cell. There was a mech in the third hallway, looking straight down into a datapad.

"You!" Overload tried to mimic the tone he'd heard the mechs from Management use. Like he was important, and other people's time and frames were meaningless to him.

The mech looked up, horror dawning across his features and the datapad clattering to the floor. He reached for his audial.

"There's no time for that," Overload snapped out, "I was working with my crew when there was a power surge. It damaged our dampeners, and that thing got into their processors and made them attack each other, like with Spreadshot. I need to get to the control room before the surge causes a cascade failure that shuts down the whole system."

Neither surges or cascade failures worked that way, but Overload was betting this Forged spitfuck had never seen the inside of a generator room in his life.

"Oh god, oh Primus, I have to--"

"You need to give me your designation," Overload said, trying to sound like the Management at the Array did, disinterested and yet somehow still malicious. "Because I'm going to have to explain to the Director why you were standing around with your pistons in your servos instead of fixing this. Come over here and steady me, help me get to the control room."

"Y-yes," he stammered, moving closer so Overload could lean on him. "of course."

"Just take me to the control room," he said, thinking of Melody and Brownout, and all of the other Managers. What would they say? "We'll comm the Director once there's something to comm him about."

The mech nodded frantically and started walking. It wasn't hard to pretend that he was just as eager as his new companion to reach the control room - largely because he wasn't pretending. In a way, he was even grateful for the maiming injury, it meant he could lean on the other mech for support while he led the way. The close proximity allowed him to pass through the security fields, and while he wasn't sure, the fake ID he'd welded up his arm might have caused the fields to pick him up as a piece of machinery and not a living Cybertronian.

When the reached the door, the mech leaned him into the doorframe and let him go, punching something into a datapad set into the wall against the door.

"Is there another security field?"

"No," he said, even as suspicion took root in his fields. He turned to face Overload. "Why?"

"Good." Overload reached out and gripped the mech by the audial. He was slow, his frame lagging to respond, but the other mech hadn't been ready for it. He loosed his hold on the lightning he'd siphoned from the rail tracks, and his new friend hit the floor instantly, twitching and seizing. Smoke seeped upwards from the gaps in his armor, but just to be sure, Overload kicked the flailing mech in the side of the helm until he lay still.

Maybe the Voice had killed Payroll, but these fuckers were the ones who had brought him here.

The warning that he was to critically injured for work was still blinking in the corner of his HUD. It had changed slightly, warning him now that he was costing Dependable Power profits by changing positions after having been slated for deactivation. Well, good. As long as he was making a bad name for them, there was one thing left to do.

He opened his chestplates and reached inside, plucking Redcap's Decepticon badge from where it was magnetized behind his spark chamber. He would have liked to have put it over the seam, but this new form meant there was no good place for it. Instead he stuck it to the shoulder of his missing arm. Maybe he would be on the news, or it would get back to Dependable Power somehow, and she would know how he had died.

The code was still sitting on the datapad near the door, and when Overload pressed the button for access it slid open with a hiss of hydraulics. 

The control room looked oddly normal. He wasn't sure what he had expected. Torture equipment? Elaborate sorcery? Some kind of Primal artifacts in precise arrangements? It was a ring of complicated consoles and holoscreens that overlooked the cell, and a lone mech was working with her back to him, though she turned when she heard him come through. Her fields bloomed with confusion and shock, and Overload slammed his servo down on the closest console, letting the lightning loose again, this time with no restraint. 

The effect was immediate and spectacular. The silver-blue electricity carried through the whole chamber, rocketing between the consoles and screens, detonating each one in turn. The glass blew out, and he heard it raining down on the top of the cell. One of the blasts threw the mech back against her chair and she lay still, half of her frame burned black. If she was offline, he didn't know, but she wasn't going anywhere soon. Alarms sounded at a panicking pitch, near deafening him. Some were in the room, others were elsewhere in the facility.

He swayed on his pedes. If it had been enough, he didn't know--

NOT YET  
COME TO THE EDGE

There was no strength left in him to resist. His energy levels flashed red, and he was out of lightning. There was something tight in his chest, his Spark was contracting, but this time the Voice wasn't pushing down on him, it was carrying him along. He was lost in its river, being swept away. 

Primus rejected those who returned to the Well by their own hand, but hopefully this wouldn't count. 

The containment cell was right below him, his pedes were half over the control room's edge. There was broken glass everywhere. The explosions had staved the top of cell was in. It was dark, and even if his visual field hadn't been shorting out, he couldn't see inside.

JUMP

He stepped off, felt the rush of air, his Element, surround him. On the way down, he blacked out.

\------------

"What do you mean," Ratchet sputtered, feeling dread churning in his tanks, "'he's gone'? How do you _lose_ a mech Orion's size?"

"I didn't _lose_ him." Prowl's tone, in turn, was crisp and professional. "He went on leave. He owns himself, he's allowed to to go on leave."

"That's not what I meant! Where did he go? Why?! Weren't you watching him?"

"Ratch," Wheeljack began, "yer flippin' out--"

"No." Prowl rolled his optics and cut Wheeljack off. "Despite what you seem to think of me, I'm not stalking my ex."

Ratchet rubbed his chevron, venting heavily. He pushed away from his desk and paced to the window of the clinic. "No, Prowl. That's not how I meant it."

"Then how did you mean it?" Prowl tilted his helm. "Did you mean that you're worried he's secretly a Prime and Sentinel is going to snatch him up?"

"What--" Ratchet whirled around. _How had he known_ \--

"I didn't." The Enforcer might as well have been reading Ratchet's processor. "I guessed."

Wheeljack's engines snapped, like they were backing up. "You fuckin' _guessed_? How'd you fuckin' goddamn guess that?"

"My guesses are better than anyone's." Prowl shrugged, and his tone was high and cold. "He's not though. You're worrying for nothing. I thought of that too, when we broke up, but it's not possible."

Ratchet snorted. "I would love for you to explain why."

"Yeah, buddy," Wheeljack said. "You know it's possible you ain't as attractive as you think you are. Run _that_ data through yer 'magic processor' and sit on it."

"Wheeljack, let Prowl explain."

Wheeljack leaned on the desk, muttering to himself at a level that was barely audible and rolling his optics. Ratchet ignored it.

"Sentinel would have sensed it, through the Matrix. It was how he found Zeta, it's in the historical records. If Orion had received Second Ignition, Sentinel would have him. If he couldn't find Orion, it would be you. Me. Wheeljack. Tumbler. Everyone he knows, until he gave himself up. I was suspicious, when I saw Drift, who wouldn't be?" Prowl rolled his shoulders, not quite a shrug. "But nothing's happened to us, and so nothing's happened to Orion. It's math, Ratchet. You worked for Malleus, as his personal physician. I'm right, aren't I?"

"I--" Ratchet began, but his servos were shaking, and he put them on the desk to make them stop. One of Wheeljack's servos closed over his, though his casual pose hadn't changed.

It was to late, Prowl had seen it, and his optics lingered. "You're terrified of Sentinel for a reason. He'd kill Orion, and all of us too, but he hasn't, because there's no reason for it. It's the same reason Void-born don't exist, the Prime would sense them and destroy them."

"You're--" Ratchet vented slowly, and his spark felt like someone was squeezing it, "you're wrong."

"Explain how."

"Prowl..." He had to take a minute, to think of what to say. On his HUD, his chronometer ticked, a reminder flashing in the corner, reminding him that at midnight, the day would change and Calibration would begin. "This can't leave this room, but the Matrix can... stop working. It can reject the Bearer. The ancient Primes can turn their gaze away from the wielder. They can't withhold power, but they can refuse knowledge."

Prowl's response was automatic. "That's impossible."

"It's not," Ratchet snapped out. "It's how we killed Malleus. It's how we knew he had to be stopped."

It was almost satisfying to watch Prowl's expression twist as he assimilated the new information. _Almost_.

"So then--"

Ratchet shook Wheeljack's servo loose, the fear had passed. It always did. Now he just felt angry, bitter, and empty. He stalked gracelessly back to the window. "So then we need to find Orion and--"

His chronometer hit midnight and the day turned. Calibration began. In the distance, far into the outskirts, something lit up the atmosphere, like a bolt of black lightning. A conduit between between the sky and earth. Ratchet pressed his servo to the glass, leaning forward to get a better look.

 _What the_ \--

The window collapsed inwards under a wave of noiseless noise, a triumphant roar that bore down on his spark. One of the shards punctured his windshields and scoured along his internals, narrowly missing his chamber. Prowl, who was standing in the middle of the room, was lifted off his pedes and thrown into the far wall with a crunch that would have alarmed Ratchet if his own systems hadn't been screaming warnings at him. Wheeljack, at least, had been partially shielded by the desk, and he merely slid backwards and tumbled off the edge. 

_Thank Primus he's alright_. It was his last thought before darkness closed over him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Kaon/Tarn combiner is named Electrocutioner. 
> 
> Also, in case there's any confusion - Kaon's an outlier (though Ratchet's never going to find him and make his case to the Senate), and he's got quite a bit of willpower. It takes special talent to be able to resist Tarn's voice powers, even in short bursts. But the thing with 'lights coming on' inside him isn't what Second Ignition is, he's not a secret Prime or anything.


End file.
